The confinement of the pandemic did nothing to hurt Sleep Token as they released their second album, This Place Will Become Your Tomb. If anything, it brought a new dimension to the music. And when they hit the stage again, it was clear that things were about to explode…
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.
We rejoined Vessel in what fans have read as the aftermath of a suicide attempt. Woven within the piano-led majesty of Atlantic is a disturbing set of clues: ‘They talk me through the damage, consequence / And how it’s a pain they know, they don’t understand / Sobbing as they turn to statues at the bedside / I’m trying not to crush into sand,’ Vessel sings, his voice fragile. Then again, Sundowning concluded with Blood Sport, and the idea of Vessel’s way of loving Sleep being a blood sport may signal that he believes it would have to end in death. Whether he did this to be closer to Sleep, or from desperation, is another question.
Opening with a song hinting at suicide is also a means of setting the tone. Lyrically, both Vessel’s obsessive highs and anguished lows feel more intense on the album, but his contrasting emotions intertwine frequently, creating something that is notably more nuanced.
Hypnosis, for example, is easy to interpret as a giddy love song – ‘You know, you hypnotise me, always’ is its central hook – but does this mean that Vessel’s relinquished even his control of himself to Sleep and is doing the deity’s bidding against his own will? Perhaps Vessel is offering not just music, but his entire self. ‘Take from me / Leave nothing left / Take everything,’ he says, before his sense of submission suddenly becomes morbid and violent: ‘Sink your teeth / Split my skin / Just make me bleed.’ Underneath, however, his desire for a more reciprocal bond has not been quelled. ‘Give me all,’ Vessel begs, ‘all that I want.’
The murky Like That, meanwhile, fuses a feeling of lustfulness with that same submissiveness (‘Fall into your eyes like a grave / Bury me to the sound of your name’), but Vessel’s desires coexist alongside a lingering frustration at their ceaseless conflict: ‘Talking with razors on your tongue / Just to provoke my combat.’
Just as with Sundowning, Vessel’s mercurial mindset prevails and he never stays in one frame of mind for long. Alkaline might ooze infatuation, but after the toxic high, he crashes again as he scrambles in Distraction. In Descending, he turns the inequality of his relationship with Sleep onto the god himself, signalling that Sleep’s promise of glory to him in exchange for his devotion has not been fulfilled. After all, his experience hardly seems glorious when it sounds like he’s in so much pain, even if he stumbles into an apparent state of amnesia and returns to his adoring ways in time for the graceful Telomeres.
By the record’s end, the fracturing of Vessel and Sleep’s relationship might just have become permanent. In the surging High Water, Vessel says he ‘will admit my defeat’ and ‘accept that I can’t pretend we will ever be together’. His grief at this splintering concludes the album on the delicate Missing Limbs, finishing on the same point of devastation that Sundowning did.
After the album’s release, Sleep Token put on their biggest Rituals yet. A victory lap of the UK in November 2021 sold out entirely, including a landmark show at London’s 2,000-capacity O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire that was met with such fervour that people in the stands were moshing even as Vessel played the opening piano of Atlantic.
“It was a few little shows – and I mean ‘little’ by contrast to the size of the places they’re playing now!” recalls opener A.A. Williams. “I’d heard a few singles, but hadn’t really delved in. When the tour was offered, I got curious and got immersed into that world. As we performed and got to see them play every day, we got locked into their performances, their music and their mystique.”
It’s interesting to note that even with the band’s rising profile, keeping identities a secret wasn’t a hard job, largely because nobody actually wanted such a spoiler.
“Put it this way: I’ve never been asked to sign an NDA,” says A.A. Williams. “It’s just a given that people respect what they’re doing. People have made this image of themselves, as that’s how they’ve chosen to present their music, so why would I or anyone else jeopardise that?”
Following the success of the tour, Sleep Token somehow found a way to outdo themselves across the summer of festivals that followed. They put on a spellbinding showing at Download, but this was dwarfed by the scale of Bloodstock two months later, where they proved so popular as headliners of the Sophie Lancaster Stage that the tent was closed off.
“We felt at the time it would be a very inspired booking,” says Bloodstock booker Vicky Hungerford. “I remember not only the tent being absolutely packed, but people sobbing because they were so moved by it. We’ve tried to get them back but they’ve blown up so quickly and they’re already onto bigger things. It’s a booking we will fondly remember, and one of the biggest attendances we’ve ever had in the tent.”
The most significant show was far smaller. In April 2022, Vessel performed at London’s Lafayette, alone with an acoustic guitar and a piano, for a Ritual entitled The Room Below. There, he showcased the band’s more minimalistic and lesser played songs, performing Give for the first time and dusting off the covers of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and OutKast’s Hey Ya! from the early days.
The Room Below broke two Ritual conventions. Not only was Vessel the only member onstage, he was also without his mask, placed next to him while he played with his back to the audience and his hood up. At shows, Vessel never talks between songs, but at Lafayette, he almost did, via disembodied voice recording.
The frontman recalled receiving a message from a fan who said he had saved them. “I did not save anyone,” he protested. “I do not believe I have the capacity to save anyone. All I have ever given anyone is a small window into the emotional waiting room of my mind. I do so while doing everything in my power to minimise my own vulnerability. In this way I am selfish. I choose not to give what others can and yet I am the benefactor of this thankful praise.
“I experience a great deal of pain in my life, however I do not believe I have suffered as you have suffered. Perhaps that is the reason we are all here – we have all suffered. I am nothing without this music. I am nothing without this mask. So in this sense, a message I received was true but only in an inverse sense. The truth is I did not save anybody. You saved me.”
In this moment, Vessel had been more vulnerable than ever before. A show like The Room Below may never happen again. Little did he know that in less than a year, stages as small as Lafayette were about to become a foreign land.
This feature originally appeared in the special edition Kerrang! Presents Sleep Token magazine.
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