— 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.

It may not be the return of tradition itself, but it still resembles it structurally in the form of a dramatic music performance. This “echo” of formerly meaningful practices matters, because it offers what the “algorithmic now” cannot: rhythm, structure and a collective temporality. The audience moves together as a community, as though engaging in a form of collective emotional sermon, all despite the absence of actual religion.

The Vocabulary of Hurt

If Han gives us the architecture of the problem, the emotional atmosphere of the 2020s shows us how it feels to live inside it. Today’s culture is saturated with the vocabulary of hurt: online spaces enable open discussions of gaslighting, trauma, toxic relationships and all things problematic. What was once confined to the therapist’s office is now public discourse in comment threads and TikTok confessionals. Pain shifted from the private to the performative: expressed in fragments, shared as memes, archived in forums.

This effect has not gone unnoticed, as even publications observe: “Given toxic relationships have dominated cultural conversations in the last few years, perhaps Sleep Token’s lyrical content is an under-appreciated aspect of why they have risen to such popularity.”^[3] What Han would call the loss of ritual form is expressed in cultural spaces such as Sleep Token fandom in a proliferation of emotional vocabulary, a “lexicon of damage,” or shared language through which intimacy itself is narrated and diagnosed. The collapse of ritual has not made us silent about pain; it has made pain the most fluent idiom of all.

The band’s mythos (or lore) reflects this. Vessel recounts the fading god Sleep visiting him in a dream, once sovereign of dreams and nightmares. Mythologically, this sounds familiar: the prophet is tasked with remembering the dying god. In this case however, prophecy is devoid of what once was authentic faith. Vessel is not Ezekiel or John of Patmos bringing visions of judgment. He is a weary custodian of decline, repeating offerings to a deity already slipping into absence. His lyrics often plead and collapse into sobs, blending fiction with personal experience. The prophecy is stripped of its authority and collapses into a liturgical psychodrama, where the only certainty is loss and hurt.

Vessel’s relationship with the god Sleep is often recognized as “almost analogous to a trauma bond”:^[4] devotion endlessly offered, nothing returned. The power dynamics of this asymmetry — love without reciprocity, faith without promise — becomes a central theme in their music. Fans are visibly touched at concerts not out of belief in Sleep, but of recognition. What they encounter is their own vocabulary of hurt, refracted through music and performance.

IV. Sincerity in Simulation

Not surprisingly, this overflow of emotions and church theatrics does not appeal to all. Critics accuse Sleep Token of taking themselves too seriously, likening their mythology and anonymity to camp rather than sincerity. The backlash can be scathing: descriptions range from “long stretches of teenager-baiting singing-about-feelings,”^[5] to “pretentious ass melodramatic poetry” [sic].^[6] One review rails against the band as nothing more than “a gimmicky cash grab,” dismissing the self-styled mythology as overhyped pretension: “This band and its rather obnoxious fanbase gives off the overall vibe of a high level of pretentiousness, people acting like these guys are martyrs, doing things the likes of which have never before been seen”.^[7]

It is not uncommon to find comparisons to Ghost, another band that stages concerts as mock-liturgies with costumes, incense, and church iconography spectacle. But where Ghost lean deliberately into hyperbolic camp and satire, clearly signaling that it is all to be taken in good fun, Sleep Token’s refusal of irony lets their “rituals” appear, by contrast, superficial. They may read as a display of overly serious inflated self-importance rather than profundity.

This criticism is not far-fetched. To call a concert a “ritual” is already to invoke heavy cultural connotation. Sleep Token lean into this entirely in their lore and presentation, bearing all the markers of sacrament, but with no actual theology to underwrite them. It calls to mind French theorist Jean Baudrillard, who, in Simulacra and Simulation (1981),^[8] argued that modern culture deals in signs detached from any original referent. Sleep Token’s ceremonies resemble this: a liturgy of gestures where nothing lies behind the curtain but the gestures themselves. It is worship of the idea of worship, ritual as affective spectacle.

What exactly is being worshipped? For Baudrillard, the answer would be: nothing. What remains is not a god but merely the sign of a god, a copy without an original. In the hyperreal, rituals no longer point beyond themselves but simulate a transcendence that is absent. Sleep Token’s performances enact this paradox: they are not ironic gestures, but post-belief gestures, affective theatre for an audience fluent in the shape of devotion but detached from its content.

The “concert ritual” therefore is the third-order simulacrum: signs that refer only to other signs. The “rituals” differ little from a product launch dressed in church drag. At the end of the day, they remain a band playing conventional venues, selling merchandise, and optimizing their genre-fluidity for algorithmic reach in the Spotify age.

But does that invalidate their impact?

Mourning the impossibility of transcendence

It is tempting to dismiss this entirely as commodified ritual, a spectacle monetized and aestheticized. Masks and anonymity as costume, the cultic language a marketing hook. Vessel’s ambiguity functions less like prophecy and more as a blank canvas for projection: if “Sleep” can mean anything, it may also mean nothing. There can be no authenticity in their performance, only simulation of intensity and the appearance of depth packaged as product.

But the opposite case can also be made. Jacques Lacan described the Real as the traumatic kernel that resists symbolization. Ritual, in his terms, would act as a suture: a practice stretched over what cannot be expressed or signified. Sleep Token’s theatrics allow audiences to gather around the wound of transcendence’s impossibility. The very excess of drama and the refusal of irony is a kind of authenticity in itself. If transcendence is no longer possible, then the only sincere gesture left is to dramatize that impossibility. The act becomes both ridiculous and vulnerable: a performative mourning for what cannot be restored. Like method actors of the formerly sacred, artists inhabit their own mythology because it provides the only framework in which longing for belief can still be expressed.

In this tension also lies the band’s cultural force. To long for authenticity while knowing the longing has already been commodified is the condition of our time. Bands such as Sleep Token make it visible, turning it into song, and song into collective feeling. Rather than attempting a restoration of ritual, they perform its collapse. This may be perceived as pretentious, but it is so in an authentic way that names the impossibility of sincerity under spectacle. Their worship is performance, their rituals simulations, yet their impact and their effect are undeniably real.

The paradox is that both the cynical and the sincere readings are true simultaneously. To call it “just a concert” is to identify the wound at its core. There is no sacred left to restore. Sleep Token mourn not by denial, but by staging it: Baudrillard’s simulacrum of a church without God, Lacan’s veil stretched over the unspeakable.

_{Feature image: Vishnu R Nair / pexels.com}

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References

1. Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 2.
2. Han, The Disappearance of Rituals, 3.
3. Emma Wilkes, “Inside the Magic and the Mastery of Sleep Token’s Early Days,” Kerrang!, January 13, 2025, accessed August 25, 2025, https://www.kerrang.com/sleep-token-formation-interview-vocalist-frontman-vessel-2018-drummer-ii-bassist-iii-guitarist-iv-debut-album-sundowning.
4. Wilkes, “Inside the Magic and the Mastery,” Kerrang!, accessed August 28, 2025.
5. Sporky, “Comment on ‘Proggy and metally but not prog metal?,’” The Fretboard, April 1, 2023, accessed August 25, 2025, http://thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/comment/3541552/#Comment_3541552
6. Reddit user (deleted), “Sleep Token?” Reddit, September 9, 2020, https://www.reddit.com/r/deftones/comments/ipntor/comment/g4l44w4/
7. Ash Likes Music, “Sleep Token — Take Me Back to Eden Review,” Medium, June 28, 2024, accessed August 25, 2025, https://medium.com/%40AshLikesMusic/sleep-token-take-me-back-to-eden-review-d1a7663ebdcd.
8. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).