Review Summary: One step forward, two steps back
Ah, good old Sleep Token. Ever since their explosion into the mainstream a couple years back, they’ve become one of the most popular mainstream metal/metal-adjacent bands, taking the success seen from bands like Bad Omens and practically tripling it. At the same time, 2023’s
Take Me Back to Eden quickly became one of the most divisive releases of the year,
especially here on Sputnik. They’re a band you either love or hate, exacerbated by a fanbase that is particularly modern, with all the positives and negatives that come with such a label.
Personally, I fit squarely into the “love” camp, with
TMBTE being a personal 2023 highlight. Judge me all you want, but my inner theater kid couldn’t hate the grandiosity of Sleep Token. And when I heard “Emergence”, I was convinced I would end up loving the masked band’s newest record just as much. However,
Even in Arcadia feels like a middling follow-up, enjoyable in its own right, but exposing the flaws below Sleep Token’s surface.
The usual bag of Sleep Token-isms are still here, and will still please most fans. The aforementioned “Emergence” and opening track “Look to Windward” are strong statements that hearken back to a lot of
Eden’s middle half, the quiet pop leading into massive rock explosions, Vessel’s soaring voice, it’s all familiar territory. If you enjoyed them in the past, these tracks will be equally as enjoyable, but detractors will likely not be won over.
II’s drumming is, once again, a standout highlight of the album’s runtime. For all the criticisms that are thrown Sleep Token’s way, the drums have always been an unambiguous strength, and the same is true for
Even in Arcadia. Once again, “Emergence” is the best example of this, with a heavily syncopated drumbeat that is sure to merit a rewind or two to wrap your head around it.
And, for once, Sleep Token do try to diversify ever so slightly. Even as the album leans heavily into the pop/trap sound (we’ll get to that), there are moments where the rock and metal elements try something new. “Gethsemane” features genuine riffs rather than downtuned djent chugs, “Caramel”’s finale brings in blast beats, and “Infinite Bath” is the heaviest section in the band’s entire discography (though that likely isn’t saying much). On the pop side, the album’s title track actually manages to succeed by cutting out guitars entirely, instead focusing on a swelling orchestral ballad, and showing that Sleep Token can commit to one genre in a single song’s runtime.
However, you then start to look at the flaws, and things begin to unravel. Despite brief moments of heaviness,
Even in Arcadia is Sleep Token’s most pop-forward album yet, and oh boy, does it ever expose the weaknesses in the formula. The album, in every respect, is far more restrained than
Take Me Back to Eden, but all this does is show off how Vessel sings with the exact. Same. Damn. Cadence in almost every trap section, or how the heavy is almost always preceded by II’s drumming coming in instead of a drum machine. Most of the transitions are smoother, except for album lowlight “Caramel”, a middling pop track that, without any warning, explodes into a jarringly heavy breakdown at the end. The same can be said for closer “Infinite Baths”, though it’s at least better than “Carmel”. In fact, most of the album sits in this awkward spot of “decent” for me, the lack of bombast hurting far more than it helps.
Which leads us into the album’s worst aspect: the lyrics. Oh my god, the lyrics.
Take Me Back to Eden had bad lyrics for sure, but the goofy cult imagery and grandiosity helped to disguise the bad, or at least make it so that you couldn’t help but chuckle at them. Here? Vessel’s pivot towards talking about fame and its negative impact results in some of the band’s most down-to-earth lyrics yet… and it’s handled with all the grace and precision of a giant-fuck-off sledgehammer. Straightforward lyrics are not a bad thing, but when you pair attempted flowery lyrics like “clawed out of my woodwork/bolts out of my blue depths” with straightforward shit like “I know I should be touring/I know these chords are boring”, it makes the attempted poetic lyrics seem purple as hell, and the straightforward stuff seem comically dumb.
Even in Arcadia is not a bad album, necessarily. It
is a squarely confused one though, unable to move forward, but unable to recapture what was left behind. The highs are still here, but far fewer, and the lows only serve to hold Sleep Token’s flaws up to a microscope. They will undoubtedly remain successful either way, and I still enjoyed myself for a good majority of the album, but it’s clear at this point that something will have to change or evolve if Sleep Token are to maintain any semblance of a decent sound in the future. Of course, whether or not they had that decency is a debate in and of itself, but that’s another discussion for another day.
