Hey, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, Internet's busiest music nerd. Hope you are doing well. And today we have to talk about a very important trend in popular music and in metal music.

That is the band Sleep Token. Their recent LP I reviewed over on the main YouTube channel, didn't enjoy it. There were a lot of people in the comments that felt a similar way. There were people in the comments who disagreed with me vehemently, and it would seem that there are a lot of people who, despite my distaste, the distaste of many, there are people enjoying the record, enjoying the heck out of the record, enough to stream it so much that it has gone number one on the charts.

And I just wanted to dig into what this means for Sleep token, for metal music, generally, with music writer Eli Enis, who I've had on this channel before talking about Sleep Token, talking about modern trends in metal, specifically when it comes to fusions with pop and so on and so forth. So I figured, what better than now to have Eli on again to basically discuss this trend, further progressing, and I guess even in a way, growing.

AF: Eli, as somebody who's also reviewed this new record, too, because you wrote a review for Pitchfork for it, and have obviously been watching the progression of all of this. Sleep Token going number one with this album. Is this a sign of something? Is this a fluke? Did they land this spot merely because there wasn't enough out there to have competition with it for that spot? Or is this a sign of this type of metal, this pop-R&B-fusion-djent Frankenstein monster that we're seeing pop up more and more? Is it really rising to a high station of cultural prominence now?

EE: I think it undoubtedly is extremely popular. Ghost went to number one about a month before with a similar... Not similar, but it was a pop metal fusion. That was a big deal for them. Sleep Token obviously have a crazy amount of fans, and this type of music, I guess, is the numbers show. It's extremely popular at the moment. What does that say about metal and things like that? I mean, you and I were not into the record. I think it's more symbolic of the inshittification of metalcore on a scale than anything else, because if you're going to take Sleep Token as a band that came from metalcore and then use that as a jumping off point to explore where they are at now, which is, I think, the most interesting thing about this is the fact that they were a straight metalcore gent band that played very heavy, abrasive music at one point and is now the number one record in the world, basically. That is, I guess, what's interesting, but how they got there, I think, is It's very crucial to understanding why this maybe isn't such an amazing or intriguing or really even that historically anomalous feat, as some people say it is.

AF: What trends or past waves, be it decades ago or even recently in metal music, have you seen or are you comparing or drawing parallels to that you're seeing this and you're like, 'Oh, this is not really a big deal, I guess?'

EE: I mean, there's been I'm not going to count '80s hair metal, I guess, but it could. There's been metal records that have gone to number one for decades, whether it was Metallica, KoRn in the '90s, Tool, Disturbed, Linkin Park in the 2000s. Basically, the same bands in the 2010s, there wasn't really much new blood reaching that level of popularity. So you had Slipknot going to number one, Tool going to number one, and Disturbed, reliably being the few bands that could achieve that marker. And you had bands coming close to that. Bring Me The Horizon went to number 2 with their 2015 album, That's The Spirit, which was not a metal album at all. That was their pivot away from metal, but a pretty impressive feat. They never went number 1, though, and their record from last year didn't even get close. But again, I'm not looking at Sleep Token as a standard metalcore band. I'm looking at them as what they sound like now, which is a massive pop rock group with some metal elements. Three Days Grace and Staind and bands of that ilk, Linkin Park, Evanescence, big pop rock, heavy rock acts with some metal accouterments have gone to number one before. Those bands sound different than Sleep token, but the amount of metal in their sound is comparable, I feel like. So I don't know. It's not shocking to me that a very glitzy, glammy pop rock album went to number one. It's interesting that there's straight up a couple of gent breakdowns on it and screams occasionally. That is genuinely unprecedented, but the majority of this record is not a metal album. So a pop rock record going to number one, a record that's even more poppy and glitzy, and manicured than a Disturbed album. Is that shocking? I don't know. Not to me, I guess.

AF: You've gone over with a fine-toothed comb, the latest record, the one before that, which I also reviewed. In your estimation, with the very intense success of the new record, would you attribute that at all to Sleep Token going even more pop on this new record? From what you can recollect and what you observe, do you feel like the mix, the ratio of pop influences to djent and metalcore influences and so on and so forth. Is that mix on this latest record roughly the same as it was on the previous one, or have they even headed into more accessible territory on this most recent record?

EE: It's definitely more accessible. There's very little metal on this album. I mean, there's some. Again, that's just an objective fact. There's just not that much metal. There are entire songs that have very little guitars on it. It's more like pop in the vein of The Weeknd or older Drake is what I compared some of these to in terms of the rap influence coming in. Whereas the last record, Take Me Back to Eden, was a relatively even split, I guess, between the weepy piano balladry pop and metalcore. There's even less on this. So yeah, of course, it's more appealing. It's an easier entry point for people who don't listen to metal to get into this band. And sleep time going to number one does not mean like, "Sugar" is going viral on TikTok right now, having a Kate Bush type moment. The actual full-bore djent music, I think you could argue maybe it's more popular than ever, but it's not more popular because those sounds are suddenly more appealing. It's more popular because they're being laundered into genuine pop music.

AF: Yeah. No, I mean, there is a point there. In the late 2010s, early 2020s, djent has most definitely been having a moment for sure, commercially, especially as some of the newer bands have brought together with it some clean lead vocals and more progressive rock elements and progressive metal elements here and there. But in the case of Sleep Token, it does not seem that what few djent influences that band currently on their latest record exemplifies. Usually, when a band in that lane gets really popular, it does tend to, in a way, I think in a healthy culture, have a bit of a trickle-down effect to the other bands in the scene doing something similarly or the bands that were pioneers for that sound to the point that you were just making. But in the case of Sleep Token, with this news record, that doesn't seem to be the case. I don't think this album is creating a broader interest in like, 'Oh, is there other metal with these kinds of guitars?' That doesn't seem to be the case.

EE: No. Even if you look at it in good faith and say that there will be some amount of people who listen to Sleep Token and use that as their gateway until listening to more underground metal, which I guess is fine.

AF: I mean, it could happen.

EE: I think it definitely will. But will it be a meaningful number of people? Or does that justify celebrating Sleep Token's number one? I think that's some of the issue I have with the discourse is people are like, 'Well, this is a big deal for our scene. You should just be happy that a band from this scene,' metalcore or whatever, got to this level. It's like, 'Well, why do I have to be happy that a band had to reduce their sound to extremely bad music, in my opinion, and scrub every element of what makes the scene, every quality of what scene metalcore is in order to achieve that?' They had to debase themselves to get there. That's not that cool to me.

AF: No, I see your point there. From what you've been able to observe with more years to watch Sleep Token reach this point, what in your view is exactly the Sleep Token audience right now? Who is the Sleep Token Stan? What is the key demographic that this band is appealing to that they seemingly just have on lock in the way that they do? Is it newer fans? Is it older fans? There's even somebody in chat theorizing that it's a bunch of older listeners who are nostalgic for something from an older time period. But simultaneously, with some of the comparisons that you were making earlier to other metal groups and artists who have had these crossover moments on the charts and a bit of pop appeal to what they do, even some of the more accessible ones, like Linkin Park, for example. I'm sure there are a lot of maybe even old-school Linkin Park fans who would see that comparison and be like, What? Linkin Park is nothing like Sleep Token. They're so much better for this reason, that reason. They're so much more artistic, and obviously, that can be debated. But I think there are a lot of metal fans who would be incensed by that comparison in a way. But again, in your view, who is Sleep Token really resonating with? Is it metal fans? Is it pop fans? Is it older listeners? Is it newer listeners?

EE: I mean, anecdotally speaking, I know old-school metalheads who straight up listen to death metal, who for some reason are really into Sleep Token and find them very exciting. I have friends who don't listen to metal at all, really, who love Sleep Token. And I know people who've been in the metalcore since the 2010s or whatever, earlier, who Sleep Token has regenerated their interest in that genre. So I think they really do have a broad appeal. And I think what's crucial about Sleep Token, and when I think about this, is what I've come to think that you can project whatever you want onto them. If you're a fan who isn't as familiar with metal, they're a really easy gateway band. I'm not saying that derogatively. They just are. They're an accessible group; you can appreciate them in that sense. If you want to be a fan of an artist that has this mystique, this concept, these theatrics to them, and you're interested in that element of the art, you can get lost in their lore or whatever and appreciate them for their visuals and the themes of their music. And they have that thing. I don't agree that they're very good at doing this, but if you are into this post-metal, progginess of their music, and that's a style of music that you appreciate, you can appreciate them in this technical way. A lot of people talk about Sleep Token as they blend so many styles. They're virtuosos. They could do a million things at once. I think they do a very poor job at all those things. But if you are someone who's into like, proggy style metal, proggy rock, I guess, you can appreciate them on that front. So I think they're like, make of them what you will type band. You can enter them from a number of vantage points and find something to like if you like their music, if you know what I mean.

AF: Is there even an argument for the case that there are metal fans who are drawn to them and because maybe they're devout metal fans and identify strictly as metal fans, maybe they're not digesting or exposing themselves voluntarily to a lot of pop music. And Sleep Token becomes that gateway for them to do so because they're like, 'Oh, well, this is like it's pop music, but it's at least metal-coded enough to where it vibes with other things that I'm listening to because it's got that metal veneer to it in a way.

EE: Yeah, definitely. I mean, if you listen to metalcore and you listen to metal, you probably don't listen to a lot of pop music. I don't think that's necessarily true anymore. It was true when I was a kid. If you like metalcore, you were against the mainstream, you know?

AF: Right. That's exactly the thing. I feel like there are less cultural barriers in that way these days. Certainly, I feel like those stringent musical consumption lines that were there when I was in high school are not there to the degree that they were decades ago. In my mind, a lot of the time when I hear this stuff, I'm just thinking, I see the pop itch, it's scratching, but why not just listen to pop? That's what I do. When I want to hear a pop song, I'll just listen to a pop. I'll just listen to a great pop artist. I won't listen to a metal band parading around as a pop band. And when I want to listen to metal, I'll just listen to metal. I won't listen to a pop artist pretend to do their worst metal impression on the song or whatever. I'll just listen to a metal song. But speak to that point, if you will.

EE: I mean, I completely agree. I love pop music. I love rap music. You can't have a true understanding and appreciation for rap music, especially modern rap music, and think that the rapping in Sleep Token is well done. You probably don't listen to that much.

AF: You can't? Really? Truly?

EE: It's a decree. I'm enforcing a decree right now. You can't. No, I mean, yeah. Here's the thing. It's a point I made in the article last year, and I remember we talked about it a little bit on the stream last year, and People had some criticisms. I'm not against the idea. I'm not some genre purist. I love 100 gecs. Okay, come on. I'm not against the idea of there being a metal band that incorporates pop or rap elements if it's done well. It's very difficult to do well.

AF: It's about doing it well. It's not about we – and I feel the same way that you do along these lines – it's not about these genres can't mix. We're not anti-genre mixing. It just has to be done well. And it's very difficult to do well. The amount of artists who fuse wildly different genres together, and they have both not only mainstream success, but also critical acclaim, that's a rarity. That truly is a rarity. I mean, usually when that does happen and it does hit some mainstream appeal, it's usually because you're getting an artist who is fusing together a few unlikely genres in a way where it's almost like a novelty. And there are a lot of listeners who are attracted to it. It's like, 'Oh, this is a crazy, silly thing. Haven't quite heard country and rap together before,' or something. So it's either pulled off that way or you're talking about artists who are pulling together the most obvious, agreeable, surface-level elements of each of these genres. Because the deeper you go into the more left field and obscure and maybe more like true head esthetics of death metal or reggaeton or hardcore hip hop and so on and so forth. The deeper you go into the specific characteristics that make all of those things what they are, and you try to pull from all those things, the harder it becomes to make them all work together as a cohesive thing, because all of these styles have vastly different characteristics. And the reason that they are the way that they are and the reason that these genres are special is because they're so different from these other genres. Having to adopt elements and ideas from other genres can be really hard to pull off, not only in terms of doing it tastefully, but just doing it well.

EE: I would say it's harder to write a good pop song than it's to write a good metal song or a good... You can make a heavy-sounding metal song. There are a gazillion metal bands that have done it. Not saying that it's easy to write a good metal song, but writing a great pop hook is really difficult, genuinely. I wouldn't expect a metal band to be able to be that... To have that much agility in that field. That said, I do think that there are contemporaries of Sleep Token. I'm not a huge fan of Bad Omens by any means, but they've written a few genuinely really good pop metal songs, I think. I think Noah from that band knows how to write a pop hook and knows how to at least blend contemporary metalcore and melodic rock in a way that feels a little more tasteful and a little more cohesive than with Sleep token. I'd say the same for Bring Me The Horizon. Whereas Sleep Token, I just think, do a really piss poor job at incorporating pop It's just very grading to me. So, yeah, it's all about the way that they execute it, not the fact that they're doing, they're attempting to do what they're doing.

AF: Yeah. No, I mean, I would also echo what you're saying there and also throw in a band like Spiritbox, for example. I can see what they're doing. Is it my favorite style of metal? No. And are there some songs that they've written where I do think, from just a pop chorus standpoint, are very well written? If I'm to look at just a glance of the musical and melodic quality of some of the best songs from, again, Spiritbox and compare that to Sleep Token. I feel like, in my opinion, I think Spiritbox has a greater appreciation of pop music than even Sleep Token does. I feel like Sleep Token is functioning off, again, just a very surface-level appreciation and understanding of all of these genres. I don't really hear, and maybe there is and it's just not showing up in the music itself, but personally, when compared to other groups out there, I don't hear a whole lot of virtuosity. I don't hear what you're saying some people claim there to be. It was like, 'Oh, man, they're so unbelievably, immensely talented, and that's why they can do everything.' I mean, I feel like these days, especially with how easy it is to consume just about anything that you want to, and all the production tips and tricks and tutorials out there to do this or that or do this other thing, you could glean pretty quickly just the basic, very simplistic ways of adopting or parroting just about any sound. Go on YouTube, trap instrumental immediately. If you're a decent producer who's been working in a DAW pretty consistently for a year, you could put down a basic trap beat in about 30 minutes to an hour with little to no understanding of what makes the genre work. And then you can fuse that with a baseline understanding of several other things that you barely know anything about. And it becomes its own thing, I guess, once you fuse it with enough things that nobody else is thinking to fuse it with.

EE: Yeah. And there definitely seems to be a trend towards... Not that this is, again, Mr. Bungle was doing that in the '90s, but I think of an artist like Kim Dracula, who is like, their music is just mixing a zillion different things together. It's like, 'Oh, the fact they're blending all of these things is what makes it interesting.' And to be fair, they have a lot of charisma. It's not for me, but I can appreciate what Kim Dracula is doing.

AF: Or even a band like Ween.

EE: Yeah, for sure.

AF: But again, part of what makes those bands so entertaining is every single song, it does sound like, 'Wow, this sounds like this could come from an artist who has spent their whole lives trying to understand playing this genre.' That's, I guess, the point that I would make there.

EE: And just to put a pin on it, too, with the Spiritbox, they know how to write interesting breakdowns, whether it's the new record, go back in their catalog, they have heavy songs that sound good as heavy djent songs. Sleep Token's djent elements, especially on this new record, are so simplistic and so generic. Anyone who spent any time listening to other types of gent pick out the... What they're doing is they're not innovating. The metal parts of this record are not being innovated upon in the same way that the pop and the rap elements feel so pedestrian, too. Again, it's just surface-level plucking of 17 things and putting them together does not make something that's spectacular.

AF: But didn't you hear the last song on the album where it gets really loud at that one part?

EE: It gets really loud.

AF: It gets really loud at that one part.

EE: There's a breakdown, yeah.

AF: That makes it extra metal. Okay. Here's a good question that somebody asked in chat, and maybe this is being avoided because the band does tend to be so mysterious. At this point, does Sleep Token, do you think, or have they even confirmed, do they even consider themselves to be metal or a metal band, or does such a categorization even matter to them?

,They did one interview in 2018, I believe, and in it, this vessel of the singer was like, 'Don't get caught up on genres. We're not about genre. We're a genre,' essentially. He was saying they're beyond genres, what they're trying to do, which that's a whole other stream to talk about the way artists talk about being beyond genre in the 2020s is a cop-out way of saying, 'I'm not doing anything particularly well.' But no, I don't know what they consider themselves, but I'll look at them. With my review, I made a point to look at them from two perspectives. I looked at them as a metal band and judged them based on being a metal band. Didn't think they were very good at that. And then I took the record in as a pop record or as a melodic rock record. And it doesn't really matter which way you cut it. However you choose to define them doesn't really matter. It doesn't change the fact that they're not a good band, in my opinion. I just feel like people are getting caught up. There's so many comments that are just like, if you're listening to them as a metal band and you're judging them as a metal band, you're missing the point. It's like, well, okay, then I'll judge them as a pop band, and they're not doing a very good job of that, too. I don't know why some of this falls flat with me in terms of the number one being so important. It's like, well, 'Yeah, a pop record going to number one. That's not that exciting. So why are you telling me to be overjoyed about Sleep Token to success?

AF: Yeah. When you do look at it as a pop record, it doesn't seem like that exciting of an event for a pop record to go number one. Another thing I wanted to ask you about your view on, and I know I didn't dig into this that much in my review. But look, there's part of me that hears the band's music, hears how it's working aesthetically, and also sees how well the band is doing on platforms like Spotify. I feel like as far as what Spotify does, how they try to serve their users – if I could stretch the word of that term – I think more like just lull them more than serve them. But still with playlists just full of tracks that all sound like uniformly the same, just lock people into longer background listening as opposed to engage listening the way that they pack so many playlists and recommendations in their algorithm with bad AI music and so on and so forth. Sleep Token, for me as a band, makes sense on a platform that makes a great deal of money treating the art of music in that way. So I think on some level, it is easy to discount the band as being like,' Oh, people are just vibing with it and enjoying it because it works as good background music,' or something. But simultaneously, there seemingly is that very significant constant lore element of the band that at least some fans are very passionate about and very into and seem to get a lot out of in terms of Sleep Token's appeal. And I wanted to know in your own view, how exactly do you feel like the lore works? Is there really any, in your view, real depth or significance to the lore? Does it contribute to the band's music in a positive way? Is it actually all that meaningful? And is at least the lour done well, if not the music?

EE: I don't know. It's one of those things that feels... They present it as being a lot deeper than I think it actually is. It feels a little fake deep to me, the lore. On previous records, there was this battle between, as far as I understand, Vessel and the deity Sleep, who was maybe... Maybe Sleep is Vessel's lover, maybe it's his abusive nemesis that shifts around. Maybe it's all a metaphor for the stuff the vessel, the human being under the mask is going through in real life. But it was all left vague enough for you to project whatever you want onto it. I think that's what's crucial about the lore, is that you can see it however you want, and you can project whatever you're feeling or however you want to take it. On the new record, what I thought they did that was interesting in concept was try, I had to peel that back, and Vessel was on a couple of songs, breaking the fourth wall a little bit and talking about the fact that hiding under a mask hasn't served him well. People are still trying to dox him, and fans are trying to crack through the lore and still want to have this parasocial relationship with him, and he was speaking to that. But I don't like reading. Reading the lyrics on these records did not leave a particularly good taste in my opionion. I don't think he's a particularly sophisticated lyricist. The lore of a metal band is, personally, I'm not that interested in that thing in general. So I'm not going to pretend that I'm invested in the lore in any real artist that I can think of. But I don't know, it all feels a little silly, a little childish to me, the way that Sleep Token goes about it. And especially the fact that the lore feels so pretentious and their whole aesthetic feels like it has this air of sophistication. There's no levity in the music at all. It's all so heavy-handed. But then you listen to the music and it's just so profoundly corny. That dissonance to me just undermines the lore. Whatever sophistication there might be in there, if you really spend the time to dig through it, it's undermined by the sound of the music. It's undermined by occasional lyrical blunders, not occasional, frequent lyrical blunders that Vessel has in the lyrics. It's hard for me to take it seriously when taking Sleep Token seriously, it all just feels ridiculous to me.

AF: Yeah, I think air of sophistication is probably the best way that you could put it. There's something with the mask and the presentation and the album art and so on and so forth that just seems like very cold and very stern and very serious. And it's like, what we're doing here is like addressing something that's really deep and really grave. But simultaneously, there is like enough of a lack of specificity there to where you can... It's a bit of a Rorschach test. You can read what you want into it, maybe not all the way, but to a very great degree. Whereas a comparison of another band that historically has been very heavy on the lore like Ghost, whose lore is very specific, not so much so that when I look at it, I don't see myself in it. It seems like this crazy, mystical, made-up, zany, religious satire that obviously I have feelings on and I have my own reads on, but I don't read into it as like, 'Oh, this is like a thing that I went through.' I'm not looking at it like that and looking for ways to project myself into it. It just seems like a fantastical experience I'm viewing from the outside that's trying to make its own point. Given whatever album cycle it's in. So I mean, just to be specific or be pointed about it, I, and I know Eli, are not necessarily inherently against lore. There's nothing wrong or bad about a band having lore or an album cycle, having some lore behind it. But we have to ask ourselves, what is the lore actually saying? What is the purpose of the lore? Is it actually clearly communicating an idea and going for something, or is it just presenting the audience with this vague sense of, 'Oh, there's actually more layers to this than you're realizing when you just listen to it on the surface?' Which, I don't know, in a way, I think could contribute to what you were describing there earlier. I feel like if Sleep Token just present to themselves as like, 'Yeah, we're just a regular gent pop band who's just going to write some hits. Maybe there'll be a little R&B.' Who cares? I think generally there'll probably be less reason to obsess over who's Vessel? Who is he?! I need to know who this man is, I need to understand everything that's going on! What's the fucking Da Vinci code of this record?! In a way, when you're presenting the band and the music in the way that you are, at least in some people, and I don't encourage anybody to harass anybody or go ahead and try to find out people's personal information, obviously, that's creepy in all contexts. But some people are going to respond to such a thing thinking like, 'oh, there's something really to this, and I have to dig, and I have to find out. Or else this thing that I'm enjoying and this thing that I'm obsessed with doesn't have any meaning. I need to know what the deeper thoughts are behind this, or else, my passion or my interest in this is for nothing.'

EE: Yeah. There's another motif that I was picking up on this record, which is this identity crisis. The first song has this line about, "halt this eclipse in me," and there's this darkness-filling vessel's soul or whatever. I don't know. But I just find it very difficult.

AF: Come on, you've never had darkness fill your soul?

EE: Oh, I have darkness in my soul. But I find it difficult to be interested or sympathize or whatever, feel any emotion towards someone's identity crisis if they literally don't have an identity. This is an anonymous man whom we don't know anything about. Whatever personal revelations he dribbles into this record, they just feel very shallow to me because you don't know anything about him. Therefore, it just all feels so anonymous. It's very hard for me to feel invested in someone's personal drama if I basically know them as well as I would know a Verizon Wireless chatbot or something, where it's just this masked entity that I don't know anything about because he doesn't speak to the public. I'm supposed to feel something about his romantic tribulations, or his identity crisis tribulations? I mean, it's just like, what buy-in is there to that? And just to go back to what you said about Ghost, very crucial about their lore is that it's a satire. There's levity to it. It's funny, it's fun, it's campy. There's none of that in Sleep Token. It's all so serious. It's all like this rain pouring down, drama at all times. And is that what pop music is? Is that metal music is? Not for me. I don't think... Unless you're talking about a black metal record, I don't want... I don't even have metal to be this dreary if it's also going to be this melodic. I mean, everything about it just clashes is what I'm saying. It's goofy.

AF: No, to your point that you were just saying, we don't know enough about him personally for anything that he's going through on a personal level to really matter. But simultaneously, he's not really giving us an understanding on that level or on the level of a character in place of who he actually is, which I feel like is also an option, too. Take, for example, someone like The Weeknd. There could be a lot of discussion over how much of the content of Abel's music is actually him in his own real life experience and how much of it is him building up The Weeknd as a character of this guy who does all these drugs and has these toxic relationships and so on and so forth. Regardless of how much of it is real or fake, we have a vague idea in our heads of who the person is, who this is all happening to, what experiences he tends to engage in, what he stands for. We understand the character archetype going into these albums or even going into his awful new movie when we engage with those things. We understand who this is happening to, why it's happening to them, and what the character's tendencies are, whether it be on a personal level or through some representation of a person. We don't know anything about what the hell Vessel is. Why do any of these feelings really matter and what context to any of them fit?

EE: I would say the same about Lana Del Rey or something, she is a quasi-mythological figure in her music, but it's still very easy to relate to and understand. It writes great pop songs. Again, people who actually understand shop.

AF: I feel like we know a a lot about Lana, though. I feel like we know.

EE: We do.

AF: I feel like we know a lot about the Lana archetype.

EE: But she's still playing it up in her music, is what I mean?

AF: No, for sure.

EE: But yeah, for sure.

AF: Comparing this to the band's last album cycle, because I know you wanted to get into this a little bit, where I think Sleep Token stood out as maybe being a little bit more singular in terms of where they stood in the metal landscape and the pop landscape. Are you now seeing with this new album doing as well as it has and Sleep Token continually being this success in rock music and in mainstream music, are you seeing more artists and groups and songs popping up that you feel like are adopting this similar sound, vibe? Is it growing into an actual measurable trend?

EE: I'd say, yeah. I'd say that there's contemporaries of Sleep Token that aren't quite as big who are doing a similar style of music and have genuine fan bases behind them. It seems like there's genuine buzz behind a band like Loathe, UK medical band who came up alongside Sleep Token, have collaborated with Sleep Token, just put out a new song that has seven different motifs within one song. In my opinion, they're not very coherent. It's got this serious post-metal, alternative metal, Deftones-y vibe to it.

AF: The Deftones vibes are big right now.

EE: Yeah, for sure. Obviously, Deftones are huge. I think sonically, I'm just thinking about a lot of the very popular metal bands, I guess, of the last couple of years. It seems to be bands that are really just stitching a bunch of unlike sounds together, whether it's Sleep Token, whether it's Loathe, whether it's Falling In Reverse. That band meshes a bunch of styles together. That sort of quick cutting and pasting. Bring Me The Horizon, too, of course. Just eclectic for the sake of being eclectic. It seems to be popular right now, but also this theatrical presentation, I think, is really popular right now in metal. I went into this in my article on metal last year. It's even more so true now, I think, with that band President that just launched last week, which is this other post-metal core band that is doing this ridiculous theatrics where they're treating the band like a presidential campaign. I mean, one of their Instagram captions was like, 'The presidential campaign notice: President will stage their first headlining rally at so and so time,' which is exactly the third-person, bulletin-style announcements that Sleep Token do on their Instagram. It all goes back to Ghost because that's what Ghost has been doing for 10 years now. This President single, it doesn't sound exactly like Sleep Token by any means, but it fits very cleanly into that stream of music alongside Loathe, where it's this pretty, Deftonesy, ethereal metal verses and crushing, djenty breakdowns. Nothing about it really feels particularly abrasive. It has this patina of popness to it.

AF: I also saw in a few clips with that President band, there was a mask involved in everything. Everything. Is this band also running the anonymous play, too, a little bit, or is that just a theatrical thing?

EE: Yeah, they were anonymous for a few weeks or whatever. They were teasing the band for a while. I don't have the guy's name handy, but he's a veteran of the UK music scene, the main songwriter. But yeah, they're trying to play up the anonymous thing. The dude's wearing a mask that looks straight up like one of the Ghost masks. It just feels like, really, we're doing this again? I guess I'm just surprised there's that much of an appetite. All these new metal bands have to have this built-in lure to this really over-the-top presentation in order to hook people in. It's not just about... Not that there haven't been concepts to metal bands since the beginning of metal, of course, but I don't know, it just feels like there's so much more intention put into it now, and it just feels very content creationy to me and just forced, I guess.

AF: I guess that's an interesting, maybe one of the final topics that we can get into here. To what do you feel like that can be attributed? As you said, metal is a genre where there's been a lot of artists that have engaged in the theatrics, have worn masks, have had other things going on outside of the music, to add an extra element of drama or maybe even visuals to what they do. But this time around in this era, it does feel maybe a little less inspired by that and a little more inspired by the weird ways in which content creators find ways to keep their audiences engaged on social media or something like that. Combine that with the pop elements and all the different zany genre fusions, where you have to cut in all this different stuff to keep people engaged. Is this a sign of needing to do this because people's attention spans are so shit? Is it a matter of bands or artists realizing, I'm a metal artist, but maybe people don't even really like metal that much. So I have to throw in all this extra stuff to people who are maybe not that into the genre to step in through the threshold and listen to something that, at least a name, is a metal band still.

EE: I think it's that. I think it's also just difficult to break through the noise right now and make a name for yourself as a musician online. So I understand, I guess, the impulse to want to have something more than just music to present. And this stuff plays well with the visuals on social media, these cryptic music video clips you can post teasing something for weeks of time to have this like, 'Oh, what's the story behind this?' It all just plays well to how you present to bands that their career is basically marketing themselves online is what a modern man has to do. I understand, looking from a cynical business standpoint, this is a useful way to, I guess, market your art. Like you said, get people invested in it beyond just the sound. It's like, 'Oh, what's this mysterious figure?' There's, I guess, potential for more buy-in in that regard. But I guess just to also bring up something that I wanted to emphasize is in terms of the genre mixing and like, 'Oh, we need to include other elements because people don't like metal that much.' Maybe there's some validity to that, but I'm not going to pretend the metalcore that I came up with in high school in the early 2010s wasn't also crudely mashing together a bunch of unlike genres. Bands like Attack, Attack, Asking Alexandria, A Day To Remember. Asking Alexandria were dropping trance bass drops in the middle of their metalcore 15 years ago. What I think was different, though, that marks this current iteration of metalcore and makes it an evolution, or I guess, maybe a deevolution, in my opinion. That stuff felt silly and uninhibited, almost. It almost felt like these were young kids just throwing shit at the wall, seeing what stuck. Attack Attack didn't think that they were artistic visionaries when they put a bass drop in their metalcore. They were doing it for shits and giggles in a way.

AF: No, they were doing it knowing how outlandish of an idea that was. Even when I recently had that Knocked Loose interview, the topic came up of like, yeah, some of the best stuff from this album that people love is just us dicking around in the studio and just being like, hey, can we do crazy reggaeton thing in the middle of this track? Rather than trying to find the blandest, easiest way to make it all fit together, let's do the craziest, most unexpected switch-up that sounds ridiculous when we change into it and just see how that plays.

EE: Yeah, I think there's something to be said for Approaching that in a way that just feels in service of having fun. I think that comes through.

AF: Having fun. Experimentation.

EE: Experimentation, yeah. Whereas Sleep Token doesn't feel experimental. It feels very clinical to me. They're putting a bunch of things together.

AF: Clinical is a really great way to put it. I think clinical is a great word to put on it.

EE: That's how I feel about them. The experimentation doesn't feel loose and fun and off the cuff. It feels so intentional. It just feels very stuffy to me. I feel that with a lot of these bands. There's just not this sense of like, thrill to the music. It all just feels so encumbered and burdened by this drab coldness, as you said, or this sternness, this severeness that I just think, pop the melodic metalcore, does it need to be severe and stern? I don't think so. I don't think that's the central appeal of metalcore. I'm wrong. Clearly, I'm outnumbered because Sleep Token is the biggest album in the world right now. Yeah, no.

AF: Clearly, we're both outnumbered. But it is still worth analyzing and asking questions about, yeah, does this type of music need to be as stern as the band is coming across much of the time in their promo material and everything like that? And not that I don't enjoy stern and super dark and super urgent or challenging metal music, I do. But usually when that is the case, I guess there's a bit of a depth to that darkness, or at least a bit of a point or a direction or a reference to where that darkness or those feelings of darkness are coming from, what's inspiring them? Like, 'Oh, we live in a world that makes me feel this way. Here are all the things about the world I exist in that are making me feel these feelings.' Whereas I don't really get that from Sleep Token. It just seems like this performative, I guess, presentation of these feelings that are disconnected from anything, like actually material that you could point to. Be like, 'Oh, this is why this is happening.'

EE: Yeah. A metal band should have... The sound of the music should be congruent with the darkness. It shouldn't be darkness paired with a bad Ed Sheeran song. It's just like, I can't take the darkness seriously if the darkness is hanging that or some of these other ridiculous rap flexes that he does on the record. It's just like, it doesn't mesh.

AF: Well, again, as staunch in our opinions as we are, clearly, just to explain it, we were clearly wrong. The band is popular, the band is successful. Sleep Token, number one greatest metal band of the modern era. All I can do is hope that one day you and I get it.

EE: That's true.

AF: Maybe it'll happen with the next album. I guess we'll just have to see.

EE: Numbers don't lie, right?

AF: Numbers don't lie. It's absolutely true. Numbers do not lie. Well, Eli, thank you for coming on and talking to me about Sleep Token's number one, modern trend in metal, and everything else, man. I appreciate it.

EE: Thank you for having me. Fun as always.

AF: No, fun as always. And I'm sure when Sleep Token gets their next number one, we'll do it again.

EE: Yearly basis now, yeah.

AF: All right. I'll talk to you later, man.

EE: All right. Take care.