Sleep Token — The Masked British Phenoms
“Will you listen?” Sleep Token vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Vessel asks on “Look to Windward,” the opening track from the band’s fourth album. Once again, the masked British phenoms seamlessly blend genres as the song goes from Kid A-era Radiohead to modern R&B to cinematic strings to an explosive metal riff. By now, fans have come to expect these kinds of dramatic shifts from the anonymous group, but Even in Arcadia isn’t just more of the same. It’s an expansion, the widening of an already impressive palette.
“Emergence” offers the gospel refrain “Go ahead and wrap your arms around me” before Vessel raps over a loop of a trilling guitar and then weaves in and out of a beefy nu metal riff. “Dangerous” is probably the closest Sleep Token has come to pure Deftones, a band they’ve referenced, sonically and melodically, on previous albums. “Past Self” takes a more straight-ahead R&B approach, but with a vocal melody that echoes back on itself to create a disorienting stereo effect.
Melancholy single “Damocles” references classic Greek mythology and seems to address Vessel’s personal struggles with fame and staying anonymous: “Nobody told me I’d get tired of myself/When it all looks like heaven, but it feels like hell.” “Caramel” might have a similar theme (“Wear me out like Prada, devil in my detail,” Vessel sings), but does it with a syncopated xylophone rhythm that drops into another Chino Moreno-like vocal melody over a tsunami of distorted guitars and a purgative nu metal beatdown.
“Provider” channels neo-soul master D’Angelo as Vessel manages to rhyme “ICU” with “I see you” before the full-metal bridge kicks in. Closer “Infinite Baths” unfurls like an extended meditation in the eye of the storm until the inevitable screaming metal barrage—the longest and most ferocious on the album—takes over. And then it fades into the shadows again, just like the band itself.
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