The exact genesis of Sleep Token is unknown. But for those who were there as they initially slinked into the light, it was clear something special was happening. From a headline gig in a tiny church, to releasing a debut album and giving Kerrang! one of their only interviews ever, their first steps were those of a band heading for greatness already…
If success is a formula, four musicians in cloaks and masks with an aesthetic steeped in symbolism and lore might not have belonged to the equation. When Sleep Token properly emerged in 2018, after forming two years prior, however, it became obvious that they were never going to remain a cult secret. Their agonisingly raw emotion and daring multi-genre approach to music has taken them stratospheric.
Whether the band ever intended on being torch-bearers for a new chapter in British metal is something we will never know. Either they are communicating to their ever-expanding, always fervent fanbase through their music, or they are silent. Even in their relative quiet, they’re communicating something. By trying to radically disentangle art from its creators’ identity or intention, they’re asking: ‘Must we really know everything about the musicians we love? Is it not better to leave everything open to individual interpretation?’
“The true identities behind Sleep Token are immaterial and ultimately irrelevant,” leader Vessel told us in 2018. The rest of the band are known only as numbers: drummer II, bassist III and guitarist IV.
Here’s what we do know. The story goes that each song Sleep Token craft is an offering to the ancient deity Sleep, who came to Vessel in a dream and promised him true glory in exchange for his full devotion. Sleep’s power is purportedly far weaker than it was – in times past, he had the ability to gift ancient civilisations with brilliant dreams or curse them with nightmares. Filling the void left by an absence of personal information is a multi-layered aesthetic littered with symbols from a multiplicity of sources – alchemical symbols, occult languages, Norse and Hindu symbology, and their logo is believed by fans to reference the Elder Futhark, the world’s oldest runic alphabet. Taken to an extreme, it could almost be studied like an ancient text.
The intrigue – and the level of commitment to maintaining it – was an obvious point of fascination from the start.
“There was nothing like Sleep Token – it was musically fresh and the imagery was instantly eye-catching; it was a very easy sell to get people paying attention,” says TesseracT guitarist James Monteith, who worked the band’s press for their early EPs One and Two. “At that stage, the band not doing interviews actually made the press even more curious. It did initially limit ‘new band’ feature coverage, but the intrigue made their momentum unstoppable.
“By Two everyone was featuring the band, even without interviews. They did attract some negativity, including a feature in one major outlet calling the image ‘goofy’ – which I’m sure they regret now as their tune has changed! – but none of this mattered as their audience was growing exponentially. As they say, ‘All publicity is good publicity.’”
Crucially, while Sleep Token might be selling out arenas these days, it did not come from nowhere. The scale and speed of their ascent was unprecedented, but the quartet cannot claim to have been overlooked. Something had always been bubbling away under the surface. Indeed, in the span of their first 10 live shows – or Rituals, as they are known – they’d played at The Great Escape, Camden Rocks, Download, Techfest and Reading & Leeds, opened for Perturbator, and played two gigs on Holding Absence and Loathe’s co-headlining This Is As One tour. Their relationship with Loathe would become one of their closest ties in the music world, as they eventually released a gorgeous cover of Is It Really You? in 2022 – a song Vessel would play on piano as a nod to them during Sleep Token’s early Rituals before it had even been released.
Kerrang! editor Luke Morton was there when they played the smallest stage at Download that summer.
“They played in the middle of the day in a rather packed Dogtooth tent – the smallest stage of the festival,” he recalls. “Such an idea seems laughable now considering they can sell out The O2 at the drop of a hat, but even six years ago you could feel they were ready for bigger stages.
“The intricacies and bombast of the sound, the burgeoning crowd connection, it was all happening before our eyes,” he continues. “Not to the level they are now, of course, but an embryonic incarnation of what Sleep Token represent today. I remember standing next to other music writers and there being a few eyeballs and nods to each other like, ‘This could be a thing.’”
The hype was brewing healthily by the time Sleep Token played their first “full” headline Ritual at London’s St Pancras Old Church on October 11, 2018. In the start of what would end up becoming a pattern for the band, they sold it out within 30 seconds. Those early flushes of success prompted them to jump from independent label Basick to major label subsidiary Spinefarm in time to release their debut album, Sundowning, in 2019.
Even as they were rolling out the singles, they did so in a way that was infused in their own mythology. Starting on June 21, the summer solstice, they released a new track every other Thursday at the time of sunset in the UK in order of the album’s tracklist, beginning with the almost choral – yet still unexpectedly heavy – album opener The Night Does Not Belong To God.
By the time the album was released that November, it was all in fans’ hands. It meant that every song got to have its own moment, as opposed to the traditional album rollout that means the singles can be held in greater importance.
There was a thrilling unpredictability about how it played out, in that Sleep Token’s habit of breaking, bending and collaging genres meant the next song could sound totally different from the last. Often, it did. It’s almost unbelievable that the twinkling radio-ready pop of Give could belong on the same album as Gods, the blazing alt-metal song that follows. Then again, it was also an album where songs could undergo a complete metamorphosis in sound from the start to the end. However soft a song might be, its final chorus would often see the guitars surge forth and bring it to a gigantic close.
The steady drip-feeding of music might have been a way to satisfy the insatiable, instantly gratifying craving for new noise, but listen closer, and it has a more theatrical purpose. Sunset is the time where Sleep draws near, as Vessel sings on The Night Does Not Belong To God: ‘And you remember everything / Only till the sun recedes again / The night comes down like Heaven.’
It might feel like Heaven in the beginning, for the night to draw in and for Vessel to connect with Sleep, but it doesn’t stay that way. Sundowning builds on the narrative foregrounded in One and Two that depicts Vessel and Sleep in a toxic struggle rife with conflict, shaped by a damaging power dynamic. Vessel is blindly devoted to Sleep – ‘You’ve got diamonds for teeth, my love / So take a bite of me just once,’ he sings on The Offering, a love song referencing the reason for Sleep Token making music – but theirs is not a particularly reciprocal relationship. There is the sense that Sleep takes, and remains unavailable. On Give, for example, Vessel implores Sleep to give him something back, or to let him know him and bring him closer.
The narrative throughline revolves around the fluctuating feelings Vessel has towards Sleep. The awestruck, devotional beginning with The Night Does Not Belong To God and The Offering gives way to a reversal of fate, and by Dark Signs, Vessel is full of self-loathing having been made a shell of his former self (‘I miss the man that I was’). His frustrations mount in Higher – ‘You are taking your time / You are killing me slow,’ he laments. But then in the seductive pop-metal of Sugar, he’s entranced again. What he perceives as bliss, however, is short-lived, and at the end of the record on Blood Sport, Vessel is left bereft and alone as his relationship with Sleep has withered again.
Sleep Token’s story is mythical, but it’s also deeply human. Anyone could have experienced at least some facet of Vessel’s relationship to Sleep – maybe there’s someone they have that obsessive, intoxicating desire towards, or resentment, or the damaging entanglement of the two. Perhaps they’ve been in that sort of relationship, which is almost analogous to a trauma bond, known in psychology as the emotional connection between a person and their abuser. Given toxic relationships have dominated cultural conversations in the last few years, perhaps Sleep Token’s lyrical content is an under-appreciated aspect of why they have risen to such popularity.
They’d also started to earn friends in high places, such as when they opened for BABYMETAL at London’s O2 Academy Brixton in July 2019.
“When I first saw their visuals, I expected them to be playing intense songs. However, when I listened to their songs, and saw their performance and worldview, it was something unexpected. It was really cool,” recalls MOAMETAL. “Their music is very comforting with a calming voice, taking a ballad style, but then suddenly on the other side changes to something angry and aggressive. It was a very new sensation to me that even though it’s a heavy tune, it calms one’s mind. When you listen to one of their songs, it becomes addictive, and you’ll listen to the next song and the next.”
On their own, they still put on a strong showing, headlining London’s Underworld in October before making their debut jaunt around North America. They’d barely digested their Christmas dinners before heading out on the road again for another UK run, performing their last Ritual before COVID took hold at Islington Assembly Hall on January 31, 2020. Though they attempted to hold socially-distanced ‘Isolation Rituals’ in March 2021, the over-optimistic estimation of when things would be better meant that they never took place.
Sundowning undeniably gave Sleep Token a strong foothold. Of course, with live shows taken off the table less than six months after the album was released, world domination was probably postponed a little. But even with a deadly pathogen standing in the way for a while, the momentum hardly dwindled – in fact, it persisted in different forms…
This feature originally appeared in the special edition Kerrang! Presents Sleep Token magazine.
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