#100 the week of May 24, 2025
What was #1? “Luther” by Kendrick Lamar and Sza in the middle of its 13 week run at the top of the charts. The upper echelons of the Hot 100 have been pretty stagnant this year.
For the first time, the Warm 100 finds itself in the relative present, and we’re confronted with a mystery. How did an anonymous prog-metal band from England score 10 songs on the Hot 100, including this song?
Who are Sleep Token? Well, that’s a good question. When I called them an anonymous prog-metal band, I didn’t mean it as an insult, implying they were a replacement-level bunch of nobodies. They truly are anonymous. Like The Residents, Sleep Token keep their identities a secret with the band’s leader and primary songwriter adopting the nom de guerre Vessel. The only other full time member is the drummer, II; though there are additional touring members named III and IV, and a backing vocal trio called Espera. The only confirmed bit of Sleep Token’s background that we have is that they were formed in London in 2016.
Like fellow masked metal bands GWAR and Ghost, Sleep Token has its own elaborate lore. Per a press release from their former label Basick Records, Sleep Token are “the mortal representatives of the ancient deity known only as 'Sleep', led by the masked and cloaked figure appointed 'Vessel' ... the master creator behind the music." So far so good; we love a metal band with a mythology and creepy mascot and/or deity.
2025 saw the release of Sleep Token’s major label debut, Even in Arcadia. The album debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200, the company’s album chart, in May. They’re actually the second masked metal band to score a #1 album this year, as Ghost achieved the same feat just two months earlier. As album sales decline* and streaming becomes the parasitic apex predator of the music industry, it’s easier for bands with devoted followings to have the best selling album in the country; and metal fans are loyal. On the few occasions I’ve been to metal shows, I’ve never seen a more supportive or loving crowd.
*Even in Arcadia hit the number one spot with a measly 127-thousand sales.
So, the simple answer to our mystery is that Sleep Token has score ten songs on the Hot 100 this year because their incredibly devoted fans keep streaming Even In Arcadia and presumably only Even In Arcadia, to the point that each track was able to chart. But this leads to a secondary question; are Sleep Token even metal?
I am admittedly not a metalhead. I respect the genre and enjoy a lot of what I’ve heard, but it’s never been a scene I actively pursue. Cards on the table, I can’t point to the intricacies of the genre and why Sleep Token has been called post-metal, metalcore, djent, or several other subgenres whose intricacies I don’t know. When I saw “Infinite Baths” in the hundred spot (where it peaked, by the way) and learned Sleep Token was a metal band with a specific public image, I was pretty excited that something like that could sneak onto the mainstream pop chart. Then I listened to the actual song and I did not get it at all. It felt, no pun intended, sleepy. Where were the riffs, the vocal work outs, the danger, the dark and ancient god to whom the band sever as emissaries? It all felt so soft and safe, just a sensitive guy crooning over microwaved beats. Eventually, it got a bit louder during a heavy, though not particularly creative, coda.
“Infinite Baths” was the album closer, an end statement for this creative chapter, and thus not necessarily a song designed to be someone’s first exposure to Sleep Token. In fairness, I played the album’s first two singles, “Emergence” and “Caramel,” as well as a couple other Sleep Token songs, and found myself similarly confounded. Although better, they still felt closer to pop acts like Ed Sheeran or Imagine Dragons (with a dash of Bon Iver) than metal greats Panthera or Anvil. Even in ballads, metal is the liveliest form of rock music; it shouldn’t be boring. The hard rock segments felt perfunctory, as if Vessel was more interested in trying his hand at pop songwriting. If I read the chorus of “Caramel,” “So stick to me/Stick to me like caramel,” in a vacuum, I’d assume Justin Bieber had followed up “Yummy” and “Peaches” to complete a trilogy of songs with unsexy food metaphors. Spın̈al Tap has more cred.
Despite all this, Sleep Token has repeatedly sold out Wembley Stadium and is currently on an arena tour of North America, even as Vessel sings on “Caramel” that “this stage is a prison,” or on “Damocles,” “I know these chords are boring.” It’s not a good sign when even you’re sick of your shtick. Maybe Sleep Token should hang it up and go to bed. As for me, I’m going to go headbang to some Flotsam And Jetsam. Maybe in the future we might get lucky and find some real metal in the 100-slot.
1/10
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