Sleep Token - Even In Arcadia Album Review

What is actually going on? There wasn't a chance that the rise in capital would shrink this soon, but why are we here already?

This article from Metal Injection provides a summary of Even In Arcadia album.

According to the article, Sleep Token's new album, Even In Arcadia, is a sprawling and ambitious work that sees the band venturing into new sonic territory. The album is also notable for its lack of urgency, which is perhaps fitting given the band's patient rise to fame.

Even In Arcadia is the third album by Sleep Token. The band's previous two albums, Northern Sunlight and Countertopology, were released in 2019 and 2020, respectively. The band has also released three EPs: The Chain, Sugar and Sleep Token.

Sleep Token are an English metal band who have been slowly but surely building a devoted following. The band's music is a unique blend of metal, electronic, pop and experimental music.

The band's patient approach has paid off. In the US, three of Even In Arcadia's pre-release singles charted on the Hot 100. In the UK, meanwhile, Even In Arcadia has become the band's first album to reach the top 40.

As hype beasts and outlets continue to bend over backwards at any mention of Sleep Token, lauding every breath taken as some evolution of the artform, it’s honestly just tiring to watch.

As a result of this, Sleep Token have boomeranged round from a potentially cool alt-crossover act to the epitome of corporate rock not that far beneath Linkin Park. ‘Organic’ groundswell doesn’t look like this, nor does it feel like Even In Arcadia with how many hands are blatantly in the pot. You can practically hear the barks of besuited overlords ringing all the way through, mandating a mainstream feel without dropping a vestige of the initial labyrinthine, heavier appeal, and imploring the added genre beats are highlighted for good measure. In the lineage of Sleep Token releases, this mightn’t have its ‘built by committee’ vibes scream out, but they’re unquestionably, chronically there.

If you’re a metal fan—as in, someone who listens to metal on a regular basis, with even some variety to your range if you’re feeling spicy—it’s totally inconceivable that Sleep Token could be your ‘favourite band’. It’s everything you’d want a metal album not to be—cold and clinical, in part out of a dormant tech-metal background, but mostly due to a complete lack of human impulse or intensity.

There’s an added dearth of meaningful progression to contend with, as it groans and gallumphs from one set piece to the next. And in true Sleep Token fashion, there’s not a lick of urgency or fluidity to this. You’d hope that’d be a granted concession if they insist on making hour-long albums, instead of allowing Even In Arcadia to feel every one of its laborious minutes.

If anything, it’s the use of metal on this album that finds Sleep Token’s creative strides at their most lacking. Rare is it that a transition to real heaviness won’t feel shockingly graceless, like laying down an immobile slab of sound that further drags an album that’s already far from spry. Sure, it’s produced to sound like a complete monolith, and deepening the swerve to land in black-metal on Caramel and Infinite Baths is more daring than expected, but it’s hard to feel all that amazed by this. All it does is propagate Sleep Token’s thudding non-pace; it doesn’t justify it.

That’s not to say the rest of this instrumentation is off the hook, though. Somehow, an already ungratifying business model has only become more so on Even In Arcadia, as it’s hard to think of another recent album that grows more draining and tiresome with each subsequent spin. Pianos slosh about; simplistic trap beats rattle along with little import; a haze of production smothers it all and draws out anything colourful or textured; it’s nothing engaging.

But what might be worse is how little a sense of direction factors into Even In Arcadia. For what’s presumably meant as tentpole epic, a disproportionate amount of time is spent meandering into the ether. It doesn’t help that Sleep Token are fond of eschewing more traditional song structures, so as they stretch themselves even further on Look To Windward, Infinite Baths and the title track—y’know, the start, end and centrepiece of the album; nothing important—they feel borderline out of their depth.

That’s the kind of heretical claim that the Sleep Token conclave absolutely despise hearing, but what’s the argument against it? Even In Arcadia does frequently sound enormous, that’s true, but it’s not enormous in a purposeful way, just one that’s big and empty. What’s more, when Sleep Token’s whole approach is founded on this clunk