cultural studies, music, performance

Rituals of Yearning: When the God Is a Man [Sleep Token, Part 3/4]

— Part III: Eroticism, Toxic Intimacy and Post-Sincerity Performance

V. Parasocial Liturgies: When the God Is a Man

What happens when the god is a man?

The answer to this question arrived, rather mundanely, in an unambiguous gesture.

In 2023, when a fan shouted Vessel’s real name from the crowd at a live show, his response was swift and un-Sleep Tokenesque: he spat water at them and flipped them off. The god was still a man, and the man was clearly pissed.

Once the civil names of band members became known, the sanctity of anonymity had been broken. Doxxing and stalking ensued: in January 2024, a supposed fan leaked bassist III’s birth certificate, home address included, and the band responded by wiping their social media and changing their bio to read, simply: “Nothing lasts forever.”¹ The band’s artistic response came later, in their song “Caramel” (2025): “Tell me, did I give you what you came for? / Terrified to answer my own front door.”² The song was unusually clear in its testimony, addressing both the water-spitting incident and the downsides of fame. Revolver later described it as the moment the band reached “forward to show the toxic fringes of their fanbase the real consequences of their parasocial behavior.”³ The anonymity, the ritual distance, the deliberate silence between songs had never been purely aesthetic; they were also protection, and that protection had finally been compromised.

Fan forums took the blow with self-awareness. Reddit threads were filled with guilt and discussed the incidents with a vocabulary borrowed from therapy culture: collective trauma, toxic behaviour, parasocial attachment. The fandom knew precisely what it had done. The structure persisted anyway, because the structure is partially the point.

There is a term for what had been breached, as this breach was only the logical conclusion of how the band’s lore had worked from the start. In 1956, communication researchers Horton and Wohl named parasocial interaction “a seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer”: intimacy that feels reciprocal to the person experiencing it, though the performer does not experience it at all.⁴

This is not new: in the past, millions of unread fan letters were once sent to Elvis Presley and the Backstreet Boys alike. The digital age has since expanded the condition to nearly every medium: Twitch streams, YouTube videos, TikTok reels. Sleep Token built it into their mythology from the ground up, since Vessel’s own relationship to the god Sleep is already parasocial: he worships; Sleep does not worship back. Fans enter a dynamic reproduced exactly, always already shaped like theirs. Devotion in both cases is offered to a silent, withholding deity, the ache in both cases deliberate. The unmasking is a culmination of jouissance: to know the god is to lose him.

The Flesh and the Veil

This can be read as parasociality working as architecture. The eroticism is not laid over that structure but produced by it: Consider the contradiction at the centre of the performance, which is not exactly subtle. The mask conceals the person while simultaneously, the bare chest offers the body. Vessel I is, consistently, shirtless. He is built, he knows it, and convincingly performs the fiction that he is unaware of it. While desire in Sleep Token’s world is filtered through metaphor and devotional language, the body is harder to argue with. A sweaty sixpack glistening in the stage lights belies any claim to restraint, asceticism or sacred distance. What results is eroticism with plausible deniability: the ritual provides the cover where the body evidently doesn’t.

Together, theatrics and body construct a specific archetype. Vessel offers a masculinity that is emotionally expressive, fragile, wounded: aestheticized submission, rare in a genre built on dominance posturing. But the fantasy on offer is covert, and it is addressed, more often than not, to the women in the crowd. They are granted emotional access to he who breaks for them. Hope is kindled: he breaks for Sleep, but he might break for you. He is desirable as wound rather than conqueror, available without being aggressive. The fantasy is not so much you could love me. It is you could worship me, and it would ruin you. The erotics are inseparable from the parasocial structure; the intimacy is real in the way all parasocial intimacy is real, which is to say always one-sided.
However, the mask is the condition of desire; the absence is what makes the wanting possible. The doxxing, however, is desire undone by violation. Circulate the name, the face, the home address, and you destroy the very distance that made the devotion possible. You cannot worship what you have reduced to a Wikipedia entry.

The danger is fully realized when desire collapses into demand and, subsequently, intrusion. “Go ahead and wrap your arms around me” now sounds less like invitation than like a non-consensual embrace the band is too exhausted to fight. Revolver observed that, in some cases, “Vessel was infantilized, sexualized, or both at once.”⁵ The god was, indeed, still a man, and now he was terrified of some of his fans.

VI. From MySpace to the Mask: A Genealogy of Longing

Romanticized suffering, the longing to be undone by love, has been staged many times before, and most of those stagings have not aged kindly. The real question is why Sleep Token’s version, which does almost exactly what an earlier generation did, escapes the verdict its predecessors couldn’t.

In the mid-2000s, aestheticized romantic suffering already took many names and shapes. One of them included a heartagram and a very specific shade of eyeliner. HIM, fronted by Ville Valo with his baritone croon and roses-and-blood visual vocabulary, were one of the era’s designated purveyors of erotic despair. “When angels cry blood / On flowers of evil in bloom”⁶ sounded like Baudelaire-by-way-of-Hot-Topic, but for a generation negotiating the emotional excess of growing up in a post-9/11, internet-awakening world, it struck a very particular chord.

Nowadays, millennials cringe at their old MySpace photos and emo party pictures. But what ages poorly often did so because it was doing something very of its moment, however unrefined the mode. Cringe is historical. HIM was melodrama for the MySpace era in the same way Nirvana was angst for the flannel generation. Pop-cultural cringe is, by and large, sincerity that time has outpaced. HIM tapped into something “real” and spoke in a dialect that has since gone extinct.

Sleep Token is doing almost exactly what HIM did: the same erotic despair, the same romance with the wound. Yet it isn’t read as cringe, and the difference is time and mode. HIM was all visibility — Valo’s face on every wall, emotions spelled out in gothic clichés, the heartagram on every surface. Sleep Token now trades excess for restraint: masks, black robes, geometric staging. HIM’s melodrama is too direct for today’s ironic, hyper-aware digital culture. It risks falling into parody. Add to this the dimension of mystery as parasocial fuel. Where HIM was about Ville Valo as icon, Sleep Token is about Vessel as enigma and site of projection. The fandom actively gets to participate in the myth-making. In the age of TikTok/Discord/Reddit marketing, ambiguity breeds community speculation, which easily leads to a deeper investment in the lore.

But the shift runs deeper than aesthetics, its most telling dimension being their treatment of masculinity.

Valo was the tortured lover, dominant even in his pain: he suffered, he bared his chest, but he swaggered doing it. Vessel inverts this entirely by performing devotion and submission. He kisses his male bandmates onstage, caresses them, collapses at their feet, and the intimacy is absorbed into the performance without apology. Judith Butler famously argued in Gender Trouble (1990) that gender is not something one is but something one performs, a set of repeated actions that produce the appearance of a stable interior self.⁷ Vessel’s performance denaturalizes the codes of masculinity the genre treats as given. Subverted masculinity is not itself new here: glam and goth, Marilyn Manson, HIM and many others before them trafficked in androgyny. What the genre had no category for is the posture of devotion and submission. Not the sensitive indie singer-songwriter dreamily playing Wonderwall, nor the theatrical queen a Prince or Freddie Mercury would offer. Something closer to the posture assigned to the devotee rather than the idol, the one who kneels rather than stands to be knelt to. What in 2025 reads as emotional sophistication, in 2003 would have read as effeminate weakness.

Bands such as Måneskin now occupy similar territory. Audiences attend not despite the singer’s feminized masculinity but partly because of it: a generation raised inside discourse about vulnerability finding, in a metal-adjacent frontman, something the genre had rarely offered. A figure who yields and comes apart and is more compelling, even irresistibly alluring, for it.

What remains constant, across both bands and both eras, is the wound: the longing to feel something real, the desire to be ruined by love. It is an unfulfillable desire, brought about by a Lacanian structural necessity of lack. The fans in the pit would probably just say “it totally hits different.”

Vessel lets the ache hover, unnamed, in the space between the mask and the voice, and offers the eroticized body to go with it. Where HIM was heartbreak you could scream along to, Sleep Token is heartbreak you kneel for.

References

  1. Emma Wilkes. 2025. “Toxic Fandom, Secret Codes, Flamingos: Inside Sleep Token’s ‘Even in Arcadia.'” Revolver, December 1, 2025, accessed June 17th, 2026. https://www.revolvermag.com/feature/toxic-fandom-secret-codes-sheet-music-inside-sleep-tokens-even-in-arcadia/.
  2. Sleep Token. 2025. “Caramel.” Lyrics. Genius. https://genius.com/Sleep-token-caramel-lyrics.
  3. Wilkes, “Toxic Fandom, Secret Codes, Flamingos: Inside Sleep Token’s ‘Even in Arcadia.'” Revolver, accessed June 17th, 2026.
  4. Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl. 1956. “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance.” Psychiatry 19 (3): 215-229.
  5. Wilkes, “Toxic Fandom, Secret Codes, Flamingos: Inside Sleep Token’s ‘Even in Arcadia.'” Revolver, accessed June 17th, 2026.
  6. HIM. 2003. “The Funeral of Hearts.” Lyrics. Genius. https://genius.com/Him-the-funeral-of-hearts-lyrics.
  7. Judith Butler. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
cultural studies, music, performance

Rituals of Yearning: A Church Without a God [Sleep Token, Part 2/4]

— Part II: The Disappearance of Ritual, the Vocabulary of Hurt, and Sincerity in Simulation

III. The Sacred in Collapse

What Part I introduced as myth and performance deserves a closer look: the interplay of ritual, simulation, and the Real.
Sleep Token’s “rituals” are successful not so much because they are visually compelling, but rather because they dramatize the impossibility of belief. Their concerts feel charged with sacred intensity, but what they actually stage is the absence of transcendence. To make sense of it, we need to consider how ritual itself has collapsed in late modernity, and what remains in its wake.

There is much to be said about the underlying crisis, the disappearance of ritual itself in modern society. One theorist in particular has made this phenomenon his core interest. Byung-Chul Han introduces his work The Disappearance of Rituals (2020) with the claim:

“[Rituals] are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable.”[1]

Ritual, for Han, is not ornament but architecture, giving duration a habitable structure through repetition. The daily gesture, the seasonal festival, the communal rite: these forms once stabilized identity by grounding people within a shared regularity. Without these forms, time “lacks a solid structure. It is not a house but an erratic stream. It disintegrates into a mere sequence of point-like presences; it rushes off.”[2] Time becomes a sequence of isolated moments with no symbolic coherence. In such a world, the self drifts, fragmented and uprooted.

Sleep Token step into this absence of ritual structure in a way that feels precisely tailored to the conditions of a younger generation. Millennials, Gen Z, and even Gen Alpha have grown up in a very particular time of cultural digitization, their lives characterized by the fragmented temporality of feeds, notifications, and on-demand culture. The band’s refusal of banal addresses to the audience, their anonymity, their carefully staged setting and robes, function as a counterweight to this stream of perpetual availability. For a few hours, fans inhabit a space where time slows and takes on symbolic shape.
Continue reading Rituals of Yearning: A Church Without a God [Sleep Token, Part 2/4] →

cultural studies, music, performance

Rituals of Yearning: The Architecture of Devotion [Sleep Token, Part 1/4]

— Part I: Invocation, the Architecture of Devotion, and the Lore of Sleep

I. Invocation

Fog coils outward from the stage and creeps into the crowd. Red and blue neon lights cut through the dark like stained glass refracting into shadow. The air moves in time with the sub-bass, a low hum felt more in the chest than in the ears. Masked figures in black ritual attire advance with liturgical precision, as though their steps mark out invisible sacraments. A hush gathers, not as silence but as reverence. Vessel appears, masked and anonymous, more apparition than frontman. He does not speak; he never does. The stillness breaks, not with the squeal of pop hysteria or the roar of a rock crowd, but with something stranger: a collective exhale. People cry. Some sink to their knees.

“Every single person was singing, I cried from the first moment to the last.”
“It’s called Worships for a reason. Think Church but in the best way possible.”
“I grew up religious. I haven’t been religious in years. The Teeth Of God tour was [the first Sleep Token] concert I went to. […] That was as close to a religious experience as I can recall.”

One fan even reports “crying for 45 minutes non-stop when I got home,” unsure whether it was ecstasy or exhaustion. [1] [2] [3]

At first, this might seem like the familiar tears of pop-idol devotion, the kind caught in phone-camera close-ups when a beloved star celebrity enters the stage. But the register is different, less celebrity ecstasy than something closer to sacred encounter. Language shapes the experience surrounding the band even before the start of the actual concert: Sleep Token exclusively refer to their shows as “rituals,” their tickets are stamped “worship event.” Inside the stage area, the concert experience borders on the dramatic, with fan reactions to songs often escalating into a collective outpour of emotion. Worship in this case is not just a metaphor, but becomes a performance of longing, subjection, and sacred ache, both by the band and the audience.

The Architecture of Devotion

The object of that worship is left deliberately ambiguous. No religious icon stands at the centre, only the shape of one. What fills the space is ceremony: sound wrapped in darkness and silence, swelling toward a release some fans go so far to describe as “cathartic.” [4] The form in which fan devotion takes shape is an affective architecture, where intimate private feeling becomes a collective event.

At its centre stands singer Vessel I, nameless, masked, mythologised. During some songs, he is overcome with emotion and his voice breaks, ending in audible sobs. It is a paradox that defines the band: hyper-sincerity through total anonymity. Vessel performs this duality with ease, and it is not difficult to see how this adds to the overall appeal. The mysterious, bare-chested frontman became a site of desire the audience could pour their longing into. His aesthetic does not ask for identification, it demands devotion: the kind once reserved for gods, then for lovers, now for charismatic performers standing in for both. In a culture that has become  allergic to cringe and saturated with ironic detachment, here is a figure singing about loss, yearning, trauma, and touch, with an open-throated ache that reverberates through his audience.
Continue reading Rituals of Yearning: The Architecture of Devotion [Sleep Token, Part 1/4] →

poetry

Atwood’s “You Begin:” A Reading

Going through Atwood’s poetry again recently, I found myself returning to “You Begin”, a poem I keep coming back to every now and then. Partly, I suppose, because it seems so straightforward, but reveals itself as being more profound the longer you engage with it; its form mirroring its content.

Some interpretations I’ve come across frame it in terms of maternal love, or the complications and insights of teaching. The readings tend to focus on the often challenging task of explaining the world’s complexity to a child who doesn’t yet have the language or experience to grasp it. I’ve always liked the poem for its elegance beneath its simple imagery: How, by formal way of an instructive educational lesson, it illustrates how language often fails to convey immediate, lived experience for which there can’t ever be an adequate linguistic substitute. Language can be surprisingly clumsy when it tries to bridge the gap between the word and the world.

You Begin is about many different things. It is a poem about the weight of language, signification, the limitations of knowledge, embodiment, and the ever-present, quiet proximity of danger. It keeps returning to the body (more specifically:  the hand)  as the final fallback when signification breaks down.

“You begin this way:  /  This is your hand,  /  this is your eye…”

The teaching begins in the body. Before abstraction and metaphor, the child understands the tangible. The body is the site of first knowledge, and the hand becomes the motif of return. Later in the poem (and, by metonymical extension, in life), when language falters and experience exceeds comprehension, it becomes the anchoring concept.
Continue reading Atwood’s “You Begin:” A Reading →

games, personal

Studies in Silence: Playing Death Stranding in 2025

Yes, the first one. I know, I know… I’m absurdly late to the party.

So why now? I finally bought it because as with most AAA games, which I always get long after they’re released, I felt I had no excuse to postpone this one any further. Mainly because Death Stranding already came out back in 2019, now the second game was just released, and I’m already being hit with spoilers for both games left and right. Thus: It was on sale. I bought it, installed it, and found myself walking across Kojima’s America about one half-hour intro later.

The whole thing is a paradox in pixel form: It’s slow, it’s lonely and it’s tedious more often than not. But it had me the second the fierce, melancholy ache of Low Roar’s Don’t Be So Serious hit me. I didn’t think I could so quickly become attached to a game which accompanies you with music as half solemn funeral march, half whiny indie ballad, combined with a strange kind of silence while you navigate craggy landscapes beneath low skies while trying not to drop your cargo and keeping your flasked Geiger-counter baby alive (yes, really). 

Kojima masterfully constructed landscapes that feel empty, but still feel full of absence’s gravity. Towers of concrete, ghostly specters, roped pathways between isolated enclaves: the architecture of loneliness as natural space. You cross these spaces as a pilgrim, delivering parcels and binding together a fracturing nation, one knot-city at a time. It’s a myth of connection through absence. The dead bleed into the living.
Continue reading Studies in Silence: Playing Death Stranding in 2025 →

personal, poetry

untitled poem no.1

it’s mockingly banal
how neatly the bitter past
blends into this year’s april
leaving no traces.

what is left?
what’s to come?
whatever else there could be,
whoever else still has a voice.

one of my very first.  originally it was written as an aside, a sort of lyrical diary entry. it’s been exactly 9 years since I wrote this one – April 9th, 2016 – and it struck me as relevant again in the light of current events (numerous global crises, political, economic etc). so I saw it fitting that it should also become the first post here. why not?

Writings from the Void