— 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.
So, why now? In a secular world wary of earnest prayer, how does a band performing the liturgy of a fictional god fill stadiums? How did a masked, anonymous, metal-adjacent act merging sacral ambience, slow-burn metalcore, and the coaxing heat of R&B erupt from obscurity into headlining stadiums and selling out international tours within months?
Sleep Token have become a musical phenomenon. Their success is indicative of a cultural symptom, speaking to a generation for whom sincerity is suspect and meaning is always-already fractured. The performance of sacred longing in “rituals,” then, seems to express a deeper cultural need for form and collective emotion, in a time that feels like it has lost its sacredness and in which traditional structures of meaning have collapsed.
It is worth following the trail of this thirst for meaning: the longing for the sacred in an age that has lost it, and the ways in which ritual, absence, and myth are rebuilt in theatrical musical performance.
II. A Brief Mythology
But let’s start at the beginning.
Sleep Token remained underground through the late 2010s, playing support slots at small venues and cultivating a mythic presence that first grew organically. They emerged from London’s underground in 2016, debuting with Thread the Needle and the self-released EP One, followed by Two the next year. Their discography kept on expanding with the debut LP Sundowning in November 2019, unveiled track by track over twelve weeks, followed by the LP This Place Will Become Your Tomb in September 2021, the band’s first entry into the UK Albums Chart. [5]
The real breakthrough, however, came with their third album, Take Me Back to Eden (May 2023). Four consecutive singles (“Chokehold,” “The Summoning,” “Granite”, “Aqua Regia”) were released in quick succession. Social media, TikTok in particular, accelerated their rise to fame. A viral clip of the outro of “The Summoning” ignited fan attention across platforms and shot the entire song up YouTube charts. Between January and February 2023, monthly Spotify listeners soared from under 300,000 to over 1.58 million; “The Summoning” topped Spotify’s global Viral 50 and entered both UK and US rock charts. [6]
By 2025, with their fourth album Even in Arcadia debuting at No. 1 in both the UK and US, they were headlining arenas worldwide. Their mysterious air was largely still intact, despite occasional breaches into their anonymity that showed the fragility of anonymity in the digital age. Singles like “Emergence” and “Caramel” broke into the Billboard Hot 100 and UK Singles Chart, while also addressing the intrusion of band members’ personal lives in their lyrics.
Genre purists struggle to place them. Post-metal breakdowns dissolve into R&B falsetto; jazz piano yields to djent riffs; ambient swells sit alongside gospel harmonies, and even the occasional saxophone dreamily makes its way into their songs. In a 2024 Kerrang! feature, fans offered the obvious explanation for the sudden explosion in the band’s genre fluidity: [7]
“They’re not just one genre. It’s literally everything.”
“I think they’ve exploded because there’s literally something for everyone in their music.”
“They’re going to get everyone into metal, literally everybody.”
The appeal, as “literally” seems to be the general fan consensus, is musical diversity: a genre buffet, offering something for everyone. But this logic doesn’t quite hold. In most cases, when artists attempt wild eclecticism, the attempt is perceived by fans as aesthetic incoherence. The industry is brutal to those who deviate from their common formula; a musical “jack of all trades” usually ends in critical disaster. The common response to musicians taking risks and deviating from known, expected genre tropes: Fans turn, outraged. Reviewers scoff.
Sleep Token succeed, however, because the distinct elements are blended into a single, coherent affective experience: the ache of absence, the intensity of devotion, the longing to believe. They do not unite audiences by catering to every musical taste, they unite them through a shared feelingscape instead. Song lyrics address abandonment, submission and sacrificial love, but also expose the problematic, twofold love-hate relationship of Vessel’s bond with Sleep.
The band’s music does not offer “something for everyone” by sound, but “something for everyone” by emotional connection. They do not appeal to pop fans or metalheads separately. Instead, they sing to a wound which is, as it seems, a culturally universal one.
The Lore of Sleep
The rise from masked obscurity to global spectacle is a success story by formation of a modern myth. Sleep Token transposes religious structure into music and branding, enacts worship as aesthetic protocol, and constructs a sacred identity through anonymity. In one of the band’s earlier and very few interviews, Vessel states: “The true identities behind Sleep Token are immaterial and ultimately irrelevant.” [8] At the heart of their mythos stands the figure of Sleep: a fictional deity who visited Vessel in a dream, promising glory in exchange for devotion. Each track, the lore goes, is a ritual “offering” to Sleep in musical communion.
Fans dissect theories, decode lore, and actively participate in the construction of the narrative. As one fan puts it: “We’re not just talking about a band anymore. We’re talking about characters, a mythology… folklore lives in interpretation, in stories passed around, in emotion.” [9]
This brings us to the heart of what Sleep Token temporarily restores: a rupture in meaning which could be read as a manifestation of the Lacanian Real, the figurative absence at the center of meaning. In an atheist understanding of the world, faith is suspended, sacredness unattainable. What Sleep Token offer to a disenchanted audience is a ritualized healing of that wound. Their concerts are secular liturgies of longing, performative rites that let people inhabit the spiritual space they cannot “believe into”, but can feel intuitively.
Their mythology (or lore, as fans put it) is not mere marketable decoration for the music (although it certainly helps sell the merch). It also materializes the void: anonymity, dream-deity, ritual framing, genre-fluid worship. It draws listeners into an experience of transcendence that goes beyond a regular concert experience. Attendance becomes a collective performance of mourning for the loss of the capability of belief. The concert as “ritual” becomes both symptom and solution, in which the lore of Sleep Token is, in essence, equal parts commercial branding and structural, ritual architecture of longing.
To follow this architecture down its theoretical rabbit hole is to encounter the Real in Lacan, the shadow-play of simulation in Baudrillard, and the faint afterimage of vanished ritual in Byung-Chul Han, which will be addressed in the following section (part 2/4).
Feature Image: Wendy Wei / pexels.com
References
- ianNubbit. 2025. “Comment on ‘What Are Concerts Like?’” Reddit, March 17, 2025. https://www.reddit.com/r/SleepToken/comments/1jd9gbd/comment/mi9nyma/.
- TruffleGrace. 2025. “Comment on ‘What Are Concerts Like?’” Reddit, March 17, 2025. https://www.reddit.com/r/SleepToken/comments/1jd9gbd/comment/mi928y6/.
- ScuderiaEnzo. 2025. “Comment on ‘What Are Concerts Like?’” Reddit, March 17, 2025. https://www.reddit.com/r/SleepToken/comments/1jd9gbd/comment/micgrcf/.
- Reddit user (deleted). 2023. “First Sleep Token Show.” Reddit, September 26, 2023. https://www.reddit.com/r/SleepToken/comments/16st1ak/first_sleep_token_show/.
- Wikipedia contributors. 2025. “Sleep Token Discography.” Wikipedia. Last modified August 26, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Token_discography.
- Wikipedia contributors. 2025. “Take Me Back to Eden.” Wikipedia. Last modified August 1, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Me_Back_to_Eden.
- Chris Bethell. 2024. “Who Are Sleep Token’s Fans?” Kerrang!, December 4, 2024. https://www.kerrang.com/who-are-sleep-tokens-fans-vessel-london-o2-arena.
- Emma Wilkes. 2025. “Inside the Magic and the Mastery of Sleep Token’s Early Days.” Kerrang!, January 13, 2025. https://www.kerrang.com/sleep-token-formation-interview-vocalist-frontman-vessel-2018-drummer-ii-bassist-iii-guitarist-iv-debut-album-sundowning.
- Melodic-Seesaw2727. 2025. “We Need to Talk About Sleep Token Fandom.” Reddit, July 28, 2025. https://www.reddit.com/r/SleepTokenTheory/comments/1mbr9q4/we_need_to_talk_about_sleep_token_fandom/.
- Harry A. Eaton. 2023. “The Lore of Sleep Token.” Boolin Tunes, January 27, 2023. https://boolintunes.com/featured/the-lore-of-sleep-token/.