It’s strange how quickly the edges of a genre can soften. One minute you’re throwing down djent riffs in the corner of some sweaty UK club; two years later, you’re flirting with reggaeton, synthpop, and gospel, racking up millions of streams, playing sold-out arenas, and headlining festivals once reserved for heritage acts with bullet belts. Such is the trajectory of Sleep Token, a band that, with their fourth full-length Even In Arcadia, are no longer disrupting the metal scene from the margins—they’re now at the centre and drawing new lines.
That centre is volatile. And that’s part of the intrigue here. Even In Arcadia is not the sound of a band coasting on momentum; it’s the sound of a band trying to reconcile momentum with identity. It’s a sleek, spacious, and at times fragmented record that expands on the blueprint they etched with Take Me Back To Eden but also tempers its ferocity in favour of something more streamlined, polished, etc. In places, it flirts with complacency. It strikes a unique and visceral stride in other areas, leaving you questioning why they don’t embrace this chaos more frequently.
Let’s start there… chaos. It’s rationed across Even In Arcadia, often showing up late to the party. Take “Infinite Baths,” which closes the record with eight minutes of swirling textures, ambient lull, and finally, a seismic breakdown that tears the floor out from under everything. It’s punishing, cathartic, and earned. But it also raises the question: what if more of the album had embraced this kind of volatility?
Earlier on, “Look to Windward” teases at eruption. It opens the record in a haze of digital unease—chiptune-adjacent keys, foggy atmosphere, a sense of something simmering. Vessel’s vocals are hushed, almost devotional, and then, right around the halfway mark, the whole thing buckles inward. It’s heavy, sure. But it’s not just about volume—it’s about disorientation, tension, release. And that interplay is where Sleep Token feel most alive.
However, the rest of the album balances intimacy and inertia. Tracks such as “Past Self” and “Damocles” reveal Vessel’s personal turmoil, fame-induced paranoia, and the erosion of identity. The lyrics have lost some mythic abstraction from earlier releases; what’s left is rawer, more confessional. “I guess that’s what I get for trying to hide in the limelight,” he sings on “Caramel,” against a beat that nods to Latin pop, only to be derailed by one of the record’s most unexpected bursts of heaviness. It’s a strange marriage—saccharine rhythm, soul-bearing verses, and then a descent into blackened fury. Does it all work? Sometimes. But you feel the gears turning.
There’s a calculated quality to parts of Even In Arcadia. Not cynically so—more like a band aware of their reach, tinkering with the dials. Songs like “Provider” and “Dangerous” are all sheen and structure. They come off like a cross between 2000s Timbaland productions and Linkin Park’s Minutes to Midnight—melodic, mid-tempo, emotionally glazed. “Provider,” in particular, wears its R&B aspirations proudly. It’s smooth, sure, but also oddly static, like it never quite earns its climax. For all their talk of divine inspiration, Sleep Token are at their most mortal when they settle into safety.
That said, Even In Arcadia isn’t a surrender to the mainstream. It’s more of a negotiation. And it’s clearest on the title track—an understated centrepiece with piano and strings that build not to the explosive payoff you might expect but to a retreat. A slow dissolve. For once, Vessel’s voice takes centre stage, devoid of any mask or myth, leaving only a sense of defeat—or perhaps clarity. “I am the final god,” he murmurs, not with triumph, but resignation.
But this is Sleep Token, so there are always flourishes. “Emergence” threads saxophone through trap hi-hats, flips falsetto into vocoder croons, and lingers in that uncanny valley between church service and strip club. “Gethsemane,” meanwhile, pulls off one of the album’s most curious left turns, half math rock, half alt-ballad, delivered with the drama of someone exorcising a ghost that keeps showing up drunk and uninvited.
And yet, for all the genre-hopping, there’s a strange cohesion here. Not in sound, necessarily, but in tone. Even In Arcadia is about dissonance between person and persona, artistic ambition and commercial demand, and worship and exposure. Vessel doesn’t so much sing these contradictions as he stews in them, shifting from vulnerability to bravado in a single breath. The anonymity, the deity lore, the mystique—it’s all here, but it’s cracking. You can feel the weight of the mask.
Which brings us back to that final track. “Infinite Baths” feels like both a purging and a warning. It doesn’t resolve the album so much as it fractures it, as if to say: whatever peace was found in Arcadia was temporary. The closing screams don’t sound like rage; they sound like surrender. Like someone who tried to make meaning out of the noise, only to find the noise was the meaning all along.
There are missteps here, yes. A few songs veer too close to mood-board territory—conceptually rich, sonically bland. Others lean so hard into genre play that they forget to leave a lasting impression. But the band’s willingness to unmoor themselves, even if it means drifting, is part of what makes Even In Arcadia compelling. It’s not a perfect record. It’s not even their most adventurous. But it is their most self-aware—and in that awareness, maybe their most human.
Which is ironic, considering the mythology. Sleep Token built their world on the idea of worshipping something unknowable, something vast and ancient and unnameable. But here, that veil slips. And what’s revealed underneath isn’t a god. It’s a person. Tired. Uncertain. Still searching.
Maybe that’s the point. Even in Arcadia, paradise comes at a cost.
Even in Arcadia is out May 9 via RCA Records.
Photo – Andy Ford
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