Let’s hop into the time machine, shall we? Set the dial to 2018: Sleep Token are a weird, masked, anonymous cult based in London, whose songs are characterised by the press as ‘Bon Iver meets Meshuggah’ and whose lyrics are ostensibly dedicated to a god that they made up. Travel back and start telling people that that lot will be metal’s biggest thing within a decade. No one, probably not even the band, would believe you.
However, that’s exactly what happened, and it’s because of 2023 single The Summoning that the inconceivable became reality. Equal parts heavy metal, funk, prog and erotica, its sensual ending and lusting lyricism found an audience outside of djent aficionados. Social media was aroused, then curious, then hooked on the rest of Sleep Token’s material: a chain reaction that lifted the band to arena headline status before the year was over.
The origins of Sleep Token are shrouded in mystery, and that’s the way they like it. As frontman ‘Vessel’ told Metal Hammer during his only-ever interview in 2017, “How we got here is as irrelevant as who we are.”
What we do know is that the band debuted in 2016 with the EP One and won a cult audience with their indie-pop/prog metal mashup. In cryptic statements, they claimed that their music was dedicated to ‘Sleep’: a deity that revealed itself to Vessel in dreams and gave him divine purpose. For every onlooker the package won over, another person was confused.
James Monteith – guitarist for prog metal beloveds Tesseract and co-founder of Sleep Token’s first PR company, Hold Tight – told Metal Hammer earlier this year: “In the tech-metal world there was a lot of buzz and excitement early on, but outside of that it seemed to be really slow going.”
Nathan Barley Phillips – co-founder of the band’s first record label, Basick – added: “In its simplest terms, we described it as ‘Sam Smith meets Meshuggah’. Those were the layman’s terms we used to describe it to people who might not get it. Believe me, there were people in those early days who didn’t!”
Nonetheless, Sleep Token’s gimmick continued through followup EP Two (2017), then the albums Sundowning (2019) and This Place Will Become Your Tomb (2021). However, the lyrics during that time gradually became less spiritual and more terrestrial, hinting towards themes of love, sex and betrayal. By the start of 2023, the band had cultivated an undeniable but still-not-enormous audience and become academy-calibre, with a UK tour in January set to crescendo at the 5,300-capacity Hammersmith Apollo in London.
On January 5, Sleep Token’s third album, Take Me Back To Eden, was announced with the release of lead single Chokehold. It was a bold electro-metal piece that captured the imagination of fans, but it would almost instantly be dwarfed by what came next. The Summoning, Eden’s second single, surprisingly dropped one day later.
What The Summoning was about remains as shrouded in mystery as everything else to do with Sleep Token. But, it clearly furthered the band’s fascination with sensual pleasures as opposed to the celestial. “I’ve got a river running right into you,” Vessel crooned after the thudding metal riff that started the song, later adding other obvious euphemisms such as, “Raise me up again / Take me past the edge.”
In terms of composition, The Summoning instantly felt like one of Sleep Token’s most ambitious outings. No longer just indie pop with big guitar parts, they’d made a near-seven-minute odyssey that featured djent riffing, climactic choruses, metalcore screams and an electro-ambient bridge. The most important bit, though, was the bouncy funk ending: completely unlike anything else in the track, yet ultimately its key to widespread success.
Before long, this climactic section transcended the typical metal audience. Prominent influencers on TikTok took notice of the sexy, swaggering progression, their enjoyment and surprise intensified by the fact that a metal band, of all things, was responsible for it. The Summoning became a hit – and it could easily have become a novelty piece, a one-hit wonder – yet the intrigue persisted.
After first exposure, Sleep Token kept pulling people back, turning a moment into a bona fide career-starter. The reason as to why will inherently vary from listener to listener, but on the whole, the band were too big an enigma to ignore. They weren’t just four fellas who made one good section of a song: they were faceless, nameless, genre-hopping, unpredictable. They were a riddle waiting to be solved. Armchair detectives wanted to know – and still do – who this Vessel character is. Meanwhile, others didn’t give a shit about that, more interested in sticking around to see what kind of unexpected style the band will fold into their ever-expanding canon next. They started 2023 in academies, and they ended it at Wembley Arena, playing to 12,500 people in December.
Monteith summarised the boom in interest: “In January 2023, Tesseract ended up playing a festival with them in the Netherlands. Architects were the top of the bill, we were main support, then Northlane were below us and Sleep Token were opening. Within 12 months, they were an arena band. Crazy!”
Kamran Haq, concert promoter and booker at Download festival, observed: “It took Bring Me The Horizon 10 years to get into arenas. Architects, 14 years… Sleep Token did it in less than five. It’s pretty nuts.”
More than two years after The Summoning came out, the curiosity (and in some cases invasive fanaticism) around Sleep Token has only intensified, and the end of this love affair is nowhere in sight. The band played the 20,000-capacity O2 Arena in London in December 2024, and they headlined Download festival to around 80,000 people in June. This year’s album Even In Arcadia came out to mixed reviews – mirroring the divisiveness of Sleep Token’s gimmick when the band first started – but it didn’t matter. The right people have been reached and they’re going to ride the hype train until the wheels fall off.
Sleep Token are mainstream now, and it all kicked off with The Summoning. The irony of it all is that these household names are still as anonymous as they were the day they emerged, completely clueless as to the frenzy to come.
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