Artists who broke out around 2020 often speak of their success like it was something they couldn’t see. Numbers on Spotify would double or even triple, but with large gatherings verboten, there was no physical impression of how their music was connecting with people.
Sleep Token were a great example. By now, they were an established band, but with the world still stuck indoors, no-one could tell just how much things had grown. It was only when live music returned – at the historic Download Pilot – that we could finally confirm the theory that they’d been a major lockdown discovery for rock and metal fans.
Making the advancement from the 800-capacity Islington Assembly Hall to being one rung on a bill below headliners Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes – with only one album to their name at the time, no less – would end up being the first giant leap they would take in their next era.
It was here at Donington Park, on June 18, 2021, that the band debuted a new song, Alkaline, opening the book on what would become their second album. The rollout that followed was slower and more traditional than for Sundowning: one single per month ’til the album arrived that September.
Each track shone a light on a different facet of Sleep Token’s music. Alkaline was a thickly textured, love-drenched rock song. The Love You Want was airy, lovelorn R&B – with the inevitable descent into heaviness towards its conclusion. Fall For Me was a genreless mid-album centrepiece performed a capella.
The album that followed felt heavier, thicker and more riff-based, while also more streamlined. This time around, genres tangled together more instead of being picked up and put down again.
Knowing Sleep Token, though, something had to be different about the way they set the scene. They did so by introducing new lore that added another dimension to the underwater themes of the album cover. Each single’s artwork featured a set of coordinates, which fans later deduced were sending them to Point Nemo, the furthest location from land mass in any given direction and, as such, the most remote location on Earth.
Upon release, each track was ascribed another set of aquatic coordinates and the further into the record they were, the deeper the location. Opener Atlantic, for example, has a depth number of 914m, later discovered to be the depth of the first-ever Atlantic deep dive. Closer Missing Limbs was 10,924m, the same as the Mariana Trench – the deepest oceanic point on the planet.
Both the Mariana Trench and Point Nemo are lonely places – the former has only ever been visited by a few people. If this is not the location where the events of This Place Will Become Your Tomb unfold, it may be where Vessel feels his spirit resides in a state of unending isolation, such is the depths of his misery in his ongoing struggle with Sleep.