Why I’m Breaking Up with Sleep Token, Part I

Or: When We Were Made, it Was No Accident

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction

2. Analyzing Sundowning

   1. Song Structure

   2. Core Techniques

   3. Electronics

   4. Instrumentals

   5. Vocals

   6. Lyrics

3. Conclusion

Introduction

Prog metal is one of the most beautifully diverse sub-genres in the world. It is full of incredibly talented artists across a range of styles and niches united by a single credo: let it be new. What inspires me most about this genre is that it rejects the standard narrative of musical innovation provided by my conservatory education: that music is teleological, that it moves forward in a single, unceasing direction from plainchant to the “Modern Era.” As a student, the sense I got from teachers and fellow composers was that we had reached a musical “end of history” sometime in the twentieth century, and that contemporary classical music was facing a post-apocalyptic crisis. Meanwhile, while Western classical music was navel-gazing about its own demise, genres like metal have exploded onto the scene within the last 50 years. While that has been long enough for purists to attempt to define the ethical codes and strictures of the genre (see Adam Neely’s great video on the topic of genre ethics), the progressive corner of the metal scene has remained committed to a non-teleological exploration of musical futures. There is no single prog metal sound. Some of what is called prog metal can hardly be called metal, but it retains that prog-factor, that ineffable quality of having been crafted with the prog ethos. Prog is less concerned with the forward movement of musical history than movement outward.¹

This is the landscape that birthed a band like Sleep Token. I have been a fan of theirs since 2019, when they released the singles leading up to their debut album, Sundowning. They embody another aspect of prog that has inspired my own musical practice: a rejection of the widespread, unspoken assumption that accessibility must run counter to musical innovation. For years, I have found them to be one of the bands in the scene most consistently releasing high-quality music, iterating and innovating on a musical formula they pioneered on their very first EP that they would hone to an infectious precision on Sundowning. This formula generally consists of vocally driven synth ballads that blossom out into crushing breakdowns played on detuned, extended-range guitar. This sort of guitar writing is known as “djent,” an onomatopoetic riff on the chugging sound made by ultra-low guitars playing aggressively polymetric grooves.²

This is why I am deeply disheartened by their drastic decline in quality evident in their latest effort, Even in Arcadia. It’s not the first time I’ve seen a prog band release both some of the best and worst music I have ever heard.³ This is the risk one runs when trying to create engaging, genre-fluid music. But more egregious than the music’s quality itself is the cynicism that pervades it. Many have praised this album for being the first time the masked, anonymous band has dropped kayfabe and let the (proverbial) mask slip. But in my view, this aesthetic of authenticity is merely an attempt at fitting in with modern pop conventions of confessionalism. It is a shame to see a band that has had a truly bafflingly rapid rise from obscurity to becoming a full-on stadium act reject their roots in such spectacularly vapid fashion. The folk narrative of the Sellout is a tale told by oldheads in many genres. But the tragic story persists because sometimes, it’s true.

In this essay, I will draw on my background as a classical singer and composer to compare and contrast Sleep Token’s first album, Sundowning with their latest album, Even in Arcadia. Sundowning is their strongest work, so Part 1 of this essay will analyze Sundowning as the blueprint for Sleep Token’s sound while Part 2 will focus on the ways their initial songwriting tendencies have distorted and devolved into dilettantish drivel on Even in Arcadia. I have found online reviews of Even in Arcadia to be either entirely uncritical, obviously paid-for promotional material, or vitriolic screeds decrying Sleep Token as the death knell for metal as a genre. While the latter crowd has valid points, I want to offer my perspective as someone with a classical lens to outline a more analytically-grounded argument for why Sleep Token’s new music pales in comparison to their early work.

To properly discuss Sleep Token’s falling-off, I must first outline their place in my life and their impact on my musical journey. My route to metal has been somewhat unconventional. As a certified Millennial-Gen-Z cusp, I had early exposure to heavy music through bands like Linkin Park and Evanescence, and later I heard bands of the Warped Tour generation such as Fall Out Boy and even more progressive acts such as Closure in Moscow. However, it wasn’t until the final year of getting my undergraduate degree in music composition that I started dipping my toes into proper metal. Anime was my gateway to the genre⁴, so I first fell in love with power-metal group Galneryus and my all-time favorite band, DIR EN GREY. Later I would delve into English-language prog like Leprous, Periphery, Gojira, Pain of Salvation, and eventually, Sleep Token. I have spent many years as both a consumer of prog metal and have leveraged my classical training to systematize its salient elements and features. Sleep Token were hugely inspiring to me during this early period of discovery and helped me forge the artistic path I am on today, leading me to alchemize the elements of metal into music for the concert hall. I am intimately familiar with Sleep Token’s work from years of being a devoted fan, and will now share my findings and critiques.

Analyzing Sundowning

Song Structure

The average Sleep Token song follows a wedge-shaped structure. Their songs begin softly, with verses that have the lyric character of a ballad. Here I mean lyric both in the poetic sense, of speaking in the first person, and also in the operatic sense, of singing in a melodic, non-declamatory style emphasizing the inherent beauty of the voice. This style serves their lead singer, Vessel, who croons in a rich (if smarmy) baritone, quite well. The verse builds to a chorus, often sung in falsetto, which lends it an unheimlich quality, or in a higher modal-voiced⁵ register which builds excitement and is in line with typical expectations of metal modal-voiced machismo. As the second verse and chorus follow, somewhere along the way the band joins in and the sound becomes fuller and more reminiscent of a typical metal song. Sleep Token are solidly within the metalcore sub-genre, so many of their songs include a breakdown: a climatic section characterized by a prominent guitar riff and drum beat that has a regular rhythmic pulse or contour that tells the listener to mosh, break stuff, revel in the force of it all. The entire song builds to this moment. Unlike many metalcore acts, most of Sleep Token’s early songs leave the breakdown for the end of the song⁶, which gives their songs a sense of blossoming into ecstasy that is highly effective and highly replicable. Most bands would kill to have such a recognizable calling card.

Some criticize the band for this, saying that the sparing use of metal instrumentals signals a reticence to be truly “metal,” or as Eli Enis puts it in Pitchfork, suggests that the band is “petrified of metal’s fundamental pleasures—screams, breakdowns, violence, riffs, exhilaration, exaltation.” (I will address this criticism in depth in Part 2 of this essay.) To me, however, coming from a classical background, their sparing use of instrumentals struck me as groundbreaking. Most rock and metal music is legible as such because the musicians play for the entire duration of a song. Sleep Token’s approach is more orchestral. To make a classical comparison, it reminds me of the intimate, sparse writing in Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder for singer and chamber orchestra, as opposed to his bombastic Second Symphony, a sprawling work for a sprawling orchestra. Combined with Sleep Token’s liberal borrowing from other genres such as trap rap, EDM, 80’s prog-pop⁷, and R&B, this further alienates traditionalist metal listeners. But again, at least in their earlier work, these influences felt much more thoughtful and seamlessly integrated, as in their debut, Sundowning.

Sundowning is Sleep Token’s most well-crafted and compelling work to date and represents the strongest version of their artistic vision. It’s only fair that I articulate the band’s many virtues present in their early work before I commit to tearing them to shreds. I will now provide a high-level analysis of some of the highlights and techniques present in Sundowning so I can properly convey how comparably lazy and uninspired their latest music is in Part 2.

Core Techniques

Sleep Token’s musical language has always skewed towards simplicity and accessibility. They are not progressive in the classic prog metal sense of having rhythmically complex songs⁸ or songs of significant length and depth, but their earlier music experiments with genre in a way that fits the progressive ethos and utilizes genuinely interesting techniques. Sundowning’s opening track, “The Night Does Not Belong to God” follows the typical Sleep Token formula, though it eschews the breakdown. It does, however, introduce an important technique: Sleep Token often opt to repeat a lyric over a traveling bassline on their choruses. On this track, this renders the melody (“The night comes down like heaven”) more of an ostinato, or, in keeping with their pseudo-religious aesthetic, a mantra⁹. Many of their choruses work like this, but my favorite instance of this technique on Sundowning occurs during the breakdown of “Say That You Will,” mixed with another technique. Over the breakdown riff, which wanders downward stepwise before climaxing on the root pitch of E, a melodic fragment from the second pre-chorus returns: “You’ve got me up in a frenzy again.” This melodic fragment functions as a sort of descant. Descants are countermelodies sung above a hymn melody, often on the final verse, and are common in church music. Repeating previous melodic ideas with added force from the moving bass creates an exciting, even frenzied effect. This technique reappears at the album’s close on the devastating track “Blood Sport,” where the lyrics from the post-chorus are sung over those of the chorus (included in parentheses):

And somewhere
(I made loving you a blood sport)
Somewhere the atoms stopped fusing
(I made loving you a blood sport)
I'm still your favourite regret
(I made loving you a blood sport)
You're still my weapon of choosing
And out there
(I made loving you a blood sport)
Stuck in a quantum pattern
(I made loving you a blood sport)
Tangled with what I never said
(I made loving you a blood sport)
You say it doesn't matter

As a composer of opera, it is rare I find skillful text-setting in popular music. Metal tends to place less emphasis on lyrics–both their content, and how they fit into the music, and sometimes text is relegated entirely to a background element in genres like black metal. Sleep Token’s text-setting is one of their best traits, and it is instrumental in making them catchy and accessible beyond a metal audience. Beyond that, the lyrics themselves, through relatively simple language, craft an engaging fictional world which I will detail more later in this essay.

Electronics

Sleep Token’s frequent use of electronics often garners criticism from metal purists. Most metal bands who bother using electronics at all use them as a garnish, but Sleep Token incorporate them deeply into the dish. On Sundowning, the synths evoke 80’s pop more than anything else and are the very first thing you hear on the first track. The synths play many roles: on “The Night Does Not Belong to God,” they appear as a playful, two-voiced ostinato, exhorting us to come and worship Sleep Token’s fictional deity, Sleep. On “The Offering,” the sounds split into a hollow trap-style melody over a fuzzy, EDM-style bass riff which is then repeated down the octave by the guitar. On “Give,” they provide dreamy, echoing tones that aim to lull one right into the bedroom. I find the synths on this album generally very tasteful, entering and exiting in songs fairly organically. Sometimes Sleep Token opt to transform the synth’s timbre throughout a track to create contrast. On the other hand, the electronic drums on Sundowning vary somewhat in quality. On songs like “Levitate” and “Give” they resort to warmed-over “boom-clap” drum sounds when the band is not playing, but get away with it since they’re used in conjunction with the 80’s-style synths (I have never said I don’t have a taste for cheese¹⁰).

However, I want to highlight an absolutely incredible use of electronic drums on this album that feels, again, orchestral. The other type of electronic drums heard on the album are trap-style drums. Their most brilliant use of these on Sundowning, and across their entire catalog, is on the song “Dark Signs.” The song opens with a simple dry, synthetic snare backbeat over a standard 808 bassline and a wailing vocal sample. Around the first minute mark, the kick drum is added: another flat, dry sound. The backbeat here is now replaced by a rim shot sample, adding welcome high frequencies. At 1:22, the only remaining drum sound is the kick which supports gradually crescendoing synths. The frequencies are being filtered through an EQ, first only allowing the lower pitches to speak and gradually opening up to a full, unfiltered sound—this is a common technique in genres like EDM and is used to build excitement for a “drop,” which here is the re-entry of the drums. For the second verse, the primary drum sound is a sputtery hi-hat part, essential to any trap song, followed by snare and kick. Over time the drums have wandered higher in pitch and increased in complexity. The vocal sample from the opening returns alongside a new synth melody, contributing more high-register sounds. There are staccato hits from a different synth which add punctuation. The second chorus is largely the same as the first, with the addition of the lead synth melody from verse 2 (played up the octave), a vocal countermelody, and the snare backbeat. This song omits the bridge and cuts straight to a repeat of the chorus, which is built up to by a brief section where the drums cut out save for snaps (an even higher pitched percussion sound!), kick, and more vocal samples, when finally, the acoustic drum kit enters in its full glory. Sleep Token’s drummer, II, has a highly idiosyncratic playing style influenced by Black genres such as Gospel and House.¹¹ His drum parts on choruses feel like solos with their ghost note filigree and flamboyant fills.

Most people who listen to a track like this don’t expect the drums to be played live–but they are. They are fully integrated into the band, which bucks the notion that electronics are an inauthentic element of their sound distracting from a more “pure” metal instrumentation. It is worth seeing to be believed, which is why I highly recommend the Drumeo interview with II where he explains his practice in his own words and plays Dark Signs and many other songs of theirs in full¹². II plays both the electronic drums and the acoustic drums, live, on a hybrid kit setup. Watching him do this on video really conveys the full effect of the gradual build-up of the drumming. This is highly sophisticated timbral transformation: starting from simple, synthetic drums largely pitched lower and with zero decay and climaxing with the pummeling force of a full metal drum kit, with clanging, high cymbals and deep double kick drum, played by one of the modern masters. It feels like watching a seasoned organist choose her stops carefully, pulling out the big ones for the grand finale. The gradual rising in pitch of the electronic drums and their careful use throughout reminds me very much of modern orchestral music. The idea of isolating a certain percussion timbre and transforming it and growing it throughout a piece is one I have explored in my own orchestral music, and I was delighted to discover that Sleep Token had done it long before I did.

Instrumentals

Apart from the drum parts, the analog instrumentals on Sundowning forego complexity for the sake of preserving the big, beautiful climaxes that the band are known for. The guitar work is minimal: there are hardly any solos in the entire Sleep Token catalog and none on their debut¹³. This works because the guitar is often used only for climatic moments like breakdowns, where otherwise it virtually exclusively provides the bassline, as the bass guitar is inaudible in the mix and seems to mostly double the guitar.¹⁴ The best example of this is the delightfully simplistic breakdown on Levitate, which utilizes the lowest guitar note hammering away on the tonic note of C exclusively.¹⁵ Vessel’s main instrument is actually piano, and while he does not usually accompany himself in performance, there are some lovely instances of piano on the album, my favorite being the piano duo texture after the first chorus of “Blood Sport.”¹⁶ Overall, the analog instruments feel well-utilized on Sundowning, and I never find the music to be too sparing of them, unlike on their latest album. Their minimalistic approach comes across as very intentional.

Vocals

The final two points I want to address regarding Sundowning are Vessel’s vocal parts–the vocal lines themselves, and his lyrics. It is no secret that Vessel’s voice is an acquired taste for some, myself included. Nearly all metal vocalists (who do not solely perform harsh vocals) are high tenors who often sing well beyond most operatic tenors’ range. What female vocalists exist in metal generally stick to the same tessitura, though some will utilize a head voice extension. (In opera, tessitura refers to the subset of a piece’s total vocal range that the voice primarily occupies.) In this landscape, Vessel’s baritone stands out. His voice is more evocative of, say, Hozier than other metal baritones like Corey Taylor or even Mikael Åkerfeldt. He is first and foremost a crooner, and his vocal passages largely lie between E3-E4 and stick closely to speech rhythm. For verses he’ll extend higher up to F-sharp 4 and top out at a respectable A-flat 4. For passages that demand higher notes, he has a serviceable falsetto that gets him up to a 6^th or so above that. Compared to their later albums, on Sundowning, Vessel uses his somewhat limited range rather effectively: verses tend to be in speech range, choruses extend into the high baritone range or falsetto. Vessel is at his most exciting when at this high edge: the high A-flat in the final chorus of “The Offering” is glorious, the sinister falsetto in “Drag Me Under” is almost excessive in how much it makes my skin crawl, and the gritty singing at the end of Blood Sport is arresting.

Vessel makes few attempts to scream across the band’s catalog, and Sundowning includes the only song where he is doing a full scream, placed front-and-center in the mix, on “Gods.” It's rough and belies a lack of training, but it’s fun and gets the job done. Later albums bury his screams in the mix, as is evident even in live shows, which signals Vessel’s insecurity in his ability to produce these sounds.¹⁷ Vessel is no great vocal technician: he has questionable taste in vowels and uses his jaw and tongue for articulation far beyond what any good taste in pop or R&B should allow. He has a vibrato that is subtle but somewhat cloying, and his attempts at vocal runs are anemic, at best. But as I’ve said before, I enjoy a fair bit of cheese, and I think his vocals serve the music best in tandem with text and instrumentals that lean into the self-indulgent creep-factor.

Lyrics

Good lyrics like Vessel’s stand out in a genre like metal where the bar for lyricism is low, leaning heavily on tropes of vague discontent, and even lower within the niche of prog metal, where discontent is often changed out for half-baked musings on philosophy, science, and religion. Vessel’s lyrics are raw, emotional, and deceptively simple–they weave a complex story that adds a key emotional payload to the incisive vocal writing and paint a portrait of a tortured, broken protagonist who seduces the listener into a dark dreamscape. Vessel chooses words that are very singable, his early lyrics use a decisive economy of language, and there is a refreshing lack of reliance on stock phrases and imagery that would become a massive problem on their later albums. Fans love to debate the extensive lore pervading Sleep Token’s texts on forums, comment sections, and Tik-Tok videos. Like many prog bands, their albums are technically concept albums based on a somewhat opaque narrative largely elaborated through their songs. In this case, Sleep Token’s lead singer, Vessel is the tortured, reluctant avatar of a long-forgotten ancient God named Sleep. Sleep has promised Vessel “glory and magnificence” through his devotion. Sleep rules over the domain of night and dreams, and shows Vessel beautiful, elysian visions as well as painful, horrifying scenes. Their relationship is abusive, seemingly mutually so, and this behavior appears to bleed into Vessel’s relationships with women in the waking world (as will become important in Part 2).¹⁸

The conceit of the lyrics is that they are ambiguous regarding the gender of the object: while Sleep is canonically a he/him deity, on later albums there are frequent references to a feminine character or characters, and it is often unclear which is being spoken of. On Sundowning, gendered language is nearly absent, as are third-person pronouns. This lends the texts a queer quality: it is clear that Vessel’s relationships in these songs are exclusively romantic, be they with his patron deity or the nameless women. Sleep Token’s fanbase is much more female-heavy than most metal bands due to the band’s genre-fluidity, accessibility, and emphasis on romance and sexuality. The band seems to know this and leans into playing up the homoeroticism in live performance. (There is a whole genre of videos with titles like “Sleep Token Gay Moments” all over YouTube and elsewhere.)

At its worst, these antics feel queerbaity and cheap, and perhaps they are just that. But at its best, the queerness in Sleep Token’s music lends welcome depth to otherwise well-worn thematic territory eroticizing an abusive, tumultuous relationship. It reminds me most of the ghazal, an Arabic poetic form often associated with Sufi mysticism in which the speaker addresses themself to the Beloved, either an earthly lover or God (whether a divine or human relationship is being discussed is left deliberately ambiguous). Ghazals frequently refer to pastoral settings, as well as intoxication, either from wine or religious ecstasy. It’s shocking how well Sleep Token’s lyrics fit this profile. “The Offering” opens with the following lines:

And you are a garden, entwined with all
You are the silence on sacred shores
You've got diamonds for teeth, my love
So take a bite of me, just once, I want to
Turn the page once again (Oh)
Take a bite

Where ghazals tend to emphasize pleasure, yearning, and the desire for closeness, Vessel’s lyrics filter these themes through a profound sado-masochism, a game of bodily sacrifice. Sleep is no merciful god. On “Say That You Will,” this desire for intimacy is perverted into a paranoia over when, not if, Vessel’s Beloved will betray him. This state of instability both tortures and excites him to the point of frenzy:

You've got me up in a frenzy again
I know you're planning to leave in the end

Won't you say that you will?
Let the impulse to love
And the instinct to kill
Entangle to one
In this light, you are mine
Till the sweat turns to blood
Won't you say that you will
Even if you won't?

This excruciating ecstasy is present in other songs as well. On “Gods,”Vessel rages at the distant ambivalence of his deity, only to give into his pain and offer it up to Sleep:

I see the gods avert their gaze from me
My fucking form is but a wreck beneath them
And they're always people I can call on
It's all so easy for me

(Eternally, eternally)
Do you like the way it feels?
Like fire from the heavens
Carving past the surface into you
And do you like the way it feels?
Like fire from the heavens
Tearing me asunder beside you

Where the songs turn more explicitly sexual, they shy away from graphic imagery and lean more on notions of possession and hunger. On Give, in an atypical move, we hear from Sleep’s perspective what he intends to do to, and for his Vessel:

You take the dark and carve me out a home
I picture you when you are all alone
I know how we got here
I know how we got here
I am the shadow, you're a passenger
I am the intake of breath so sharp and I know you better
Just wanna know you better

I'll tear the fibre from the filament
I'll be the limit of your light again
I wanna taste you better
I wanna taste you better
I will be watching for your enemies
To let them know that they contend with me
I wanna know you're out there
I wanna know you're out there

The single best instance of Sleep Token leaning into their sexuality, however, appears on “Sugar.” The song’s lyrics are simple, relying on their usual tropes of sado-masochism, hunger and pursuit, but it all comes together masterfully in tandem with the music. The song is mostly a synth ballad sung entirely in falsetto. This vocal choice combined with the lyrics suggest strongly that the speaker here is Sleep, again. Some songs on the album alternate between modal voice verses and falsetto choruses (“Give,” “Say That You Will,” and “Take Aim”, though in the latter the verses are falsetto, and the chorus is modal voice), however here there is no alternation. The first instance of modal voiced singing is during the bridge, which precedes the song’s climax:

Do you wanna see how far it goes?
Do you wanna test me now, my love?
You must be crazy if you think that I will give in so easily
Things we buried low
Comin' to the surface now, my love
You must be crazy if you think that I will give up the game

After this, the band finally enters and Vessel sings the chorus again, this time high in his modal register, full of growls and bluesy runs that are just the right kind of dirty. He is at height of his powers: self-indulgent, smarmy, creepy, and with utter abandon. As on “Blood Sport,” the band employs the descant technique: the chorus repeats twice at the end, and on the repeat, Vessel sings the melody from the bridge over the chorus.

Sleep Token’s sexy songs are a mixed bag for me. Because they don’t rely on explicit erotic imagery, they do best when they are sexy in a creepy way, and they are at their creepiest and sexiest here. The whole song feels like an exercise in denial kink, teasing the listener until the very moment the drop hits. While many of the band’s songs play with variations on this formula, I feel this song pulls it off best. The song “Gods” precedes “Sugar,” and it feels like narratively Vessel has been forced to his breaking point by the end of “Gods” and in “Sugar,” Sleep comes in, at once soothing and mocking Vessel because he knows that there is nowhere else for him to be.¹⁹ I’ll be blunt: “Sugar” is the best Sleep Token song because the band is at their most unapologetic here. The best parts of their worst impulses define this track, as they elevate the sado-masochism of the text to an aural-somatic experience for the listener, forcing them to feel what Vessel feels emotionally and physically. Above all, in this song, the band is having the most fun they ever do. “Sugar” is the best use of the Sleep Token song formula, and they have yet to surpass it.

Conclusion

Sundowning is the quintessential Sleep Token sound. It features nearly all the techniques the band would go on to use in their subsequent work. The song formula first prototyped on their EPs has been honed to a highly effective, replicable precision. The musical performances are strong, and the more problematic elements of their sound have yet to metastasize into what they would become. Lastly, on this album their narrative concept is at its strongest, precisely because of the ambiguous writing style that lends itself to dualistic readings and how the music synergizes with the text. Unfortunately, as the band began to expand their sound on later records, the cracks present in their songwriting process would grow and deepen, culminating in the utter mess that is Even in Arcadia—to be discussed in Part 2.

1. Sometimes this movement is backward, even. The postmodern, pseudo-70’s prog of Pain of Salvation’s Road Salt albums comes to mind. There are other prog artists that borrow elements from historic genres who warrant discussion in a separate essay.

2. Eli Enis’ review of Even in Arcadia situates Sleep Token within djent history very well: “Previous Sleep Token albums were more firmly grounded in djent, a style of rhythmic metal characterized by polymetric chugs played on downtuned eight-string guitars. Djent was pioneered at the turn of the century by Swedish extreme-metal scientists Meshuggah, then exploded in popularity worldwide in the early 2010s. Sleep Token aren’t so much innovating the form as they are plundering and prettifying artifacts from djent’s creative peak in 2013. Even in Arcadia’s sporadic metal sections can be traced back to Northlane’s cryptic post-metal djent, Issues’ rap-infused nu-djent, and After the Burial’s brutally groovy prog-djent. The difference is that Sleep Token’s approach is sleeker, softer, and more overtly commercial—an embodiment of the way the once progressive sub-style has become, well, djentrified for mass consumption in the 2020s.”

3. Sometimes, this occurs on a single album. I’m reminded of the both frustrating and exhilarating album Pitfalls by Leprous. A fitting name.

4. Anecdotally, this seems to be a common way people get into metal these days.

5. Modern vocal pedagogues find the term “modal voice” more precise than “chest voice” as “modal” refers to the specific sort of vocal cord closure in this register whereas “chest” refers to where the singer feels their resonance in their body while singing in this register.

6. There may even be an unconscious structuring of the songs around the Golden Ratio. The use of this in music is a topic for another essay.

7. It is amazing to me how no review I have read has made the obvious connection between bands like Genesis and Sleep Token. They owe a great deal of their sound to them. But some are more content to compare them to other pop-rock bands they don’t like, such as Nickelback or Imagine Dragons. This strikes me as obviously bad faith and lazy, but there are two genuine points of comparison with those bands which I will address in Part 2.

8. Obviously, their drum parts are very busy but the instances of common prog metal techniques like mixed meter, polyrhythm, or groupings are few and far between. Also, the overwhelming majority of their music is in 4/4.

9. For me, this recalls slightly the Dirge from Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings. Here, Britten does not merely have the bassline travel, but the entire instrumental ensemble engages in a double fugue while the vocal line is static throughout, only changing in dynamics upon each repeat. Britten’s Dirge is essentially what would happen if you wrote an entire piece around this vocal-ostinato idea.

10. I did say I am a Pain of Salvation fan. (Sincerest apologies to Daniel Gildenlöw, I think you’re a mad genius.)

11. I generally find this integration of these influences in Sleep Token’s work more subtle and measured on Sundowning. I have, however, strong criticisms of their borrowing from Black vernacular music on Even in Arcadia which I elaborate on later.

12. This description of the drumming on “Dark Signs” is accurate to the album version; the version II plays in the Drumeo video contains added use of the cymbals prior to the final chorus and other alterations not present in the studio recording.

13. This for two reasons: on Sundowning, Vessel tracked the guitars himself before they had a full-time guitarist and bassist. Secondly, modern metal generally has trended away from the guitar solo. The few solos you do hear nowadays tend to be only a few bars. I find this unfortunate. Outside of mainstream and pop-oriented metal acts, however, the practice is preserved in prog and in more extreme metal sub-genres.

14. This is not a specific criticism of Sleep Token: metal is notoriously difficult to mix because virtually every frequency is elevated. Additionally, as in all modern music, certain sacrifices must be made to accommodate listeners who play music from low-fidelity devices like their car or phone speakers. There is also a trend in modern metal/metalcore against independent basslines. Japanese bands seem to be an exception.

15. Breakdowns comprised solely of the tonic pitch are a staple of certain metalcore bands.

16. Of course, this is unplayable by a single person and was accomplished through traditional audio layering in a DAW.

17. I fully believe he lip syncs his screams live, either over playback or one of their backup singers.

18. This summary is cobbled together from Vessel’s sole interview, a now-deleted YouTube video that was over three hours long, and my own musings.

19. VERY similar energy to the Act III duet from Massenet’s Manon, “N'est-ce plus ma main...”