Revolver are celebrating Sleep Token’s record-breaking Even in Arcadia era with an updated and expanded edition of our special collector’s issue on the UK heavy-music phenoms. In this excerpt, writer Emma Wilkes tells the story behind their 2019 full-length debut, Sundowning.
Sleep Token formed in 2016 in the U.K. They self-released their debut EP, One, in December of that year, before signing to Basick Records for their 2017 three-track follow-up, Two. From the beginning, there was a mystique about them: The image of four anonymous musicians in cloaks and ornate-looking masks, their exposed chests and arms daubed in thick black paint, invited questions.
At first, Sleep Token answered those questions, if cryptically, but soon they would begin declining all interviews. In the early days, it seems, Sleep Token acknowledged that their story required a little exposition.
A commonly held misconception among the fandom is that Sleep Token have only ever done one interview, with British music magazine Metal Hammer in 2017, around the time of the “Calcutta” single’s release. In fact, the band granted another interview in 2018, to Kerrang!, and in both of those rare press engagements, Vessel underscored the artistic purpose of their concealed identities.
“How we got here is as irrelevant as who we are — what matters is the music and the message,” Vessel declared to Metal Hammer. “We are here to serve Sleep and project His message.” When asked in that same conversation about the band’s genre-defying approach, he said: “Life is dark. Life is bright. Life is ugly. Life is beautiful. Don’t get lost in genres, they’ll disorientate you. Music is for everyone.”
In the Kerrang! interview, Vessel doubled down on Sleep Token’s philosophy of unhitching the art from its makers. “The true identities behind Sleep Token are immaterial and ultimately irrelevant,” Vessel said at the time. “Art has become entangled with identity… our aesthetic is there to fill the void left by that absence.”
True to those words, Sleep Token have remained anonymous and eschewed interviews ever since. Instead, they’ve communicated almost entirely through their music and its accompanying visuals. Each song is an apparent offering to the primeval deity known as Sleep, a once powerful being who, according to the band’s lore, promised Vessel ultimate glory if he were to devote himself fully to him. He’s now known as Sleep because — as background information shared by Basick Records put it — “no modern tongue can properly express its name.” His past saw him wield far greater power than in the modern age, bestowing ancient civilizations with “the gift of dreams and the curse of nightmares.”
As insightful fans have noted, Sleep bears a wealth of similarities to the Shadow archetype in Jungian philosophy, which is part of the unconscious mind and is composed of repressed ideas, weaknesses and desires, and the aspects of oneself that are seen as not just unacceptable to society, but contradictory to one’s own personal morals and values.
Is Vessel devoting himself to Sleep by offering him this music as a token, or is he appeasing him? The consensus among the fans who have poured their free time into unpacking the overarching narrative in the band’s music is that it’s the story of a toxic power struggle. Vessel oscillates from a love bordering on obsession to frustration, desperation and anger at Sleep’s apparent indifference or even outright resistance towards him, explaining the fluctuations in mood from one Sleep Token song to the next.
This narrative had already been foregrounded in the band’s first two EPs, but it was much more fully realized on their 2019 debut album, Sundowning, which also marked their first release on Spinefarm Records. Its title refers to a phenomenon experienced by dementia patients, regarding a range of behavioral changes that typically, but not necessarily, begin as the sun is setting and resolve themselves by the morning. Those who experience it may become agitated or anxious, sometimes feeling like they are in the wrong place, like they need to go home despite already being at home.
Sundowning, the album title, might then refer to a feeling of disorientation and distress that comes over Vessel whenever Sleep — presumably a creature of the night — arrives. The lyrics of “The Night Does Not Belong to God” seemingly confirm this: “You remember everything/Only ‘til the sun recedes once again,” Vessel croons, before the chanted hook comes in: “The night comes down like heaven.”
Sundowning didn’t get a typical album rollout — by the time it was released in November 2019, all of its 12 songs were already in fans’ hands. Starting on June 21st, the summer solstice, the band dropped a new track every other Thursday at the time of sunset in their native United Kingdom, beginning with album opener “The Night Does Not Belong to God” and proceeding along the tracklist order. From both an artistic and marketing perspective, it was an innovative approach, one of many ways Sleep Token were out to buck tradition.
Not only did the regularity of the rollout build a sense of anticipation, but it also kept Sleep Token at the front of fans’ minds as they outpaced the speed at which most bands could release singles ahead of a new album. Brilliantly, the campaign also fit into the band’s story. Every fortnight, as the sun was setting, Vessel presented yet another offering to Sleep.
On Sundowning, as well as the band’s subsequent LPs, each of these offerings had its own visual identity. In the case of Sleep Token’s first album, every song is represented by a sigil, a series of interconnected shapes — often lines, triangles and circles — that together construct some sort of meaning. It is believed that the symbols have various origins. Some reference the Elder Futhark (the oldest runic alphabet, which is also referenced in Sleep Token’s logo) and the Enochian letters (an occult language), while others resemble the symbols for demons in the goetic grimoire Ars Goetia (a 17th century book on sorcery). The aspect of the sigils that has most fascinated the fans, however, is their connection to alchemical symbology.
Alchemy is an ancient tradition that is both philosophical and proto-scientific, and fans have latched onto the alchemical meanings of the sigils as a means of finding hidden significances within the songs. For instance, the sigil for “The Offering” features the symbol for a chalice or crucible and the symbol for fumes or smoke, suggesting the idea of something being burned as a ritual sacrifice. Within the song itself, Vessel makes this notion more explicit: “This is a giving, an offering/ In your favor, a sacrifice in your name,” he sings.
That’s one of the simpler examples. For a song like “Dark Signs,” the symbology becomes a little more complex. One of the individual symbols in its sigil refers to “sublimation,” a phenomenon in which someone witnesses something that challenges the limits of human understanding and the capabilities of human comprehension. This may well be what Vessel experiences interacting with Sleep. In the chemical context, sublimation refers to a substance’s transition from the solid to the gas state, or vice versa — which could be interpreted as a metaphor for the transition from being in one’s body to being only a spirit.
Meanwhile, the symbol for iron, which also appears in the “Dark Signs” sigil, is traditionally associated with the process of making two opposite chemical components separate from each other. Consequently, it’s hardly a coincidence that the song itself establishes a growing sense of division between Vessel and Sleep: “Where we met, there must have been dark signs,” Vessel sings, while he later concedes in the chorus that “I hate who I have become” as a result of surrendering himself to Sleep.
Vessel’s feelings towards Sleep fluctuate so wildly that the overarching narrative of Sundowning is hard to grasp at first. The album opens by establishing Vessel’s devotion towards Sleep in its most straightforward and reverent form; the minimalistic “The Night Does Not Belong to God” is practically a modern devotional hymn, presenting Vessel at his most eager to worship Sleep. In contrast, “The Offering” introduces not only heavier riffs but also a fuller picture of the seemingly limitless capacities Vessel believes he has for love. The recurring image of biting and feeding is underscored by every repetition of “take a bite,” suggesting that Vessel is fully willing to lose parts of himself, even violently, to sustain and please Sleep.
By the third track, “Levitate,” the foundations begin to wobble, with Vessel now gripped by anxiety over the prospect of being separated from Sleep, or of Sleep no longer needing him. “I can tell you won’t remember my cracking bones,” he despairs, eventually asking: “Will you levitate where I won’t reach you?” In the next song, “Dark Signs,” his fears have come true and he’s looking at the wreckage of their relationship, missing the man he was before they first met, even wondering if the demise of their bond was inevitable.
Yet after the conflict between them intensifies in “Higher,” “Take Aim” finds Vessel so deep in a state of love that he’s defiant, almost daring Sleep to come back to him — “Make me tear my body/Make me yearn for your embrace,” he challenges. “Sugar,” a couple of tracks later, represents the second emotional peak of the album with Vessel in the full throes of desire, but with an undertone of darkness and violence. He knows Sleep plays a “twisted little game,” but remains “addicted to the pain” nonetheless.
After the romantic dreaminess of “Drag Me Under,” Sundowning ends on a note of frustration with “Blood Sport.” Once again, everything for Vessel has fallen apart and he’s left exhausted by all he sacrificed for limited reward: “I made loving you a blood sport/I can’t win,” he curses, marking the second downturn in his mood and fortune on the record. It serves as a lasting reminder — intensified by the singer sobbing over the final trills of the piano — that their bond is a destructive force, where Vessel gives and Sleep takes.
Musically speaking, Sundowning is arguably Sleep Token’s softest album. It might be their most pop-oriented, as well. “Give,” for example, has the slickness and the arcing, aerobic shape in its melody of something that might have floated around the mainstream in the mid-2010s, while the vibrating synth lines and trap percussion of “Dark Signs” and “Sugar” evoke the feeling of modern R&B.
On the other hand, there’s plenty here that verifies Sleep Token’s metal credentials. The bite of the guitars cuts through like a surprise attack in the middle of a song, a bait-and-switch structure that has become all the more frequent as Sleep Token have evolved. A notable exception is “The Offering,” which melds siren-like synths with gnashing guitars and intertwines them tightly rather than handling them as separate tools.
By far the heaviest song on Sundowning, however, is “Gods,” an alt-metal slice of fury that stomps and swaggers with greater harshness than anything else on the album, recalling Deftones at their angriest, as well as Sleep Token’s contemporaries in Liverpool metal upstarts Loathe. Regardless, it’s rare for Sleep Token to stick to just one sound — even the anger of “Gods” dissipates for a while with a delicate, twinkling piano bridge.
When Sundowning was released, Sleep Token were in a promising position. On October 3rd, 2019, they performed a Ritual at the Underworld, a 500-capacity venue in London that often acts as the first rung on the ladder of an up-and-coming band’s success. Plant a flag at the Underworld, and it’s a sign your band is truly going somewhere.
Later that year, the album brought them to the U.S. for the first time, and then they returned to the U.K. for a headline tour in early 2020. Unbeknownst to them, however, the Ritual they played at the 900-capacity Islington Assembly Hall on January 31st would be the final one for almost a year and a half — not even the act of worshipping Sleep could justify gathering during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The band did attempt to organize a series of socially distanced shows known as the “Isolation Rituals” in March 2021, but the virus was still too rampant at the time for them to go ahead. Not even Sleep himself could know how fast Sleep Token might have risen if there hadn’t been a pathogen standing in their way.
Nonetheless, when the staging of Rituals was approved by the government again, it would neatly coincide with a whole new chapter for the band. Sleep Token’s sun was about to rise to another level.
You can read more about Sleep Token’s acclaimed rise to fame in Revolver’s updated and expanded special collector’s issue, available to order with two new alternate, collectible covers over here.