Sleep Token suck.
This is my simple thesis. But my reasoning has less to do with their music than with what their fans claim they represent for metal. However, a brief word about their music is in order. Musically, Sleep Token mashes together a series of genres which are, to normie listener’s unfamiliar with metal, not meant to go together. The end result is an incoherent slate of sound that sometimes almost coheres when it leans into one genre form closely (“Vore” for example). Mostly it’s alternative prog rock masquerading as innovative metal, Slipknot for Gen Z and uncultured millennials. But it is this mash that their fans deem innovative and compelling. And it is this obsession with innovation, progress, and novelty that concerns me more. The incessant need to praise Sleep Token for being innovative, breaking a mold, producing music their audience has never heard before is symptomatic of a deeper cultural rot. Ignoring that these comments demonstrate a general musical illiteracy, the underlying assumption is that new is good, that all progress in musical form is a net good.
Novelty and progress are not an inherent goods. And with regard to metal, lovers of metal love it precisely because of certain familiarities. It is not a fetish for the past that guides or motivates us but rather a deep sense that these objects we love are present, gifts available to us still. By stating this I am revealing myself be the holder of, after Michael Oakeshott’s definition of it, a conservative disposition:
They center upon a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be. Reflection may bring to light an appropriate gratefulness for what is available, and consequently the acknowledgment of a gift or an inheritance from the past; but there is no mere idolizing of what is past and gone. What is esteemed is the present; and it is esteemed not on account of its connections with a remote antiquity, nor because it is recognized to be more admirable than any possible alternative, but on account of its familiarity: not, Verweile doch, du bist so schon, but Stay with me because I am attached to you.
While black and death metal may not be for everyone, they are still living genres. And within these living genres are musicians who create music built upon a firm grasp of the tradition out of which they come. They innovate without abandoning the essential core of the form because that basic core matters and, because, frankly there is no genuinely new innovation. Whatever is declared new has probably been done before. This is as true in music as it is in tattooing as it is in film. You work with the gifts given to create something new out of the familiar.
Sleep Token does not do this. They take familiar genres, dilute them to their most base elements, blend them, and make them unfamiliar. This unfamiliarity strikes some as new and progressive, an innovation to be praised, but to those with ears to hear the unfamiliarity is unsettling, unpleasant, and discordant. I love metal not because I fetishize the past but because it is familiar. Even in its most experimental forms like Imperial Triumphant and Liturgy something familiar remains. With Sleep Token being unfamiliar is a virtue.
Sleep Token is bad music. But they’re also unfortunately a product of algorithmic marketing predicated on the next new thing. In a few years the algorithm will shovel a new band into people’s faces and they’ll forget they ever liked Sleep Token. Ceaseless obsession with novelty for its own sake only leads to an inability to appreciate beauty right in front of you. Today: Sleep Token. Tomorrow: some atmospheric pornogrind jazz fusion monstrosity.
Perhaps they’re simply not my cup of tea. But unfortunately the demand for ever new and evolving delights breeds fans who abandon the familiar, which requires a commitment to something, for the incoherent wasteland of progress.