Sleep Token

The enigmatic British band Sleep Token fuses tropes from post-rock, post-classical, and post-metal with soulful indie pop vocals to produce a blend that sounds like nothing else. Their innovative debut album, Sundowning, arrived in 2019, and mainstream success followed two years later through the U.K.-charting This Place Will Become Your Tomb. In 2023 the anonymous, masked collective unveiled their third full-length effort, Take Me Back to Eden, which rapidly turned into an international success by reaching the higher reaches of the charts in multiple countries.

The group first appeared in 2016 with the self-released single "One." Their approach stood out sharply: fronted by a mysterious masked figure known only as Vessel and professing to worship an ancient deity called Sleep, they presented themselves as a kind of cult whose songs functioned as acts of worship. Sleep Token's music proved equally original, merging tranquil post-rock instrumentation and soulful falsetto vocals with sudden eruptions of tech-metal brutality. Frenzied online speculation followed regarding the members' identities, with Sam Smith, Hozier, and Bastille's Dan Smith named as possible candidates. Traces of Deftones, Meshuggah, Explosions in the Sky, Bon Iver, and Ólafur Arnalds could be heard, yet the whole exceeded the sum of its parts.

Sleep Token signed to Basick for their 2017 single "Two," then self-released additional singles in 2018 before shifting to the Universal-distributed Spinefarm for the 2019 debut Sundowning. Across six months every track from the LP was issued as a digital single ahead of release. A larger budget allowed the album to expand into a widescreen version of the band's sound, incorporating more electronic elements, a pronounced R&B edge to the vocals, and a sludgier post-metal feel in the heavier sections. A deluxe edition of Sundowning with four extra tracks surfaced in 2020. The 2021 release This Place Will Become Your Tomb earned the band their first chart positions, entering at number 39 on the U.K. Albums Chart and 13 on the Scottish Albums Chart. Their third album, Take Me Back to Eden, appeared in May of 2023. Produced by bandleader Vessel with assistance from engineer Carl Brown, its epic and somewhat chaotic sound connected immediately, soon charting across various countries and entering the Top 20 in Australia, the U.S., Germany, the U.K., and beyond.