https://www.nme.com/features/music-features/sleep-token-vessel-mysterious-masked-collective-3389250
Formed in 2016, the band’s origin story is steeped in lore. The story goes that Vessel was visited in a dream by an ancient deity known as Sleep, who promised him “glory and magnificence” if Vessel were to follow him. Each of Sleep Token’s songs are said to be dedicated to this deity, while their sound is just as intriguing: splicing tuned-down tech-metal with the lighter elements of pop and R&B to create a soundscape that’s not only heavy, but curiously accessible.
Of course, countless rock bands have previously flirted with theatrics, aliases and anonymity. Despite some comparisons to the Swedish band Ghost (though the two bands sound nothing alike), Sleep Token’s theatricality feels subtler, darker and richer with detail. It’s an approach that quickly helped them build a cult following, though they’ve since outgrown their status as underground heroes. Having previously supported Architects, the band have since become major headliners in their own right – not to mention the fact that they’re consistently selling out every show they play.
Sleep Token have kicked things up a notch this month. It started on January 5 when the band, with no prior announcement, released a new song, the thrilling and riff-grinding ‘Chokehold’, before following it up the next day with ‘The Summoning’. Two more tracks, the R&B-influenced ‘Granite’ and ‘Aqua Regia’, dropped on consecutive days two weeks later after they were debuted on the first night of Sleep Token’s UK tour in Birmingham. New music and the events of the tour saw the band trend on Twitter, while their Spotify stats skyrocketed from under 250,000 monthly listeners to its current total of 1.6 million.
One notable Sleep Token fan is The Darkness’ Justin Hawkins, who praised ‘Chokehold’ on his popular Justin Hawkins Rides Again YouTube series. “This is the kind of thing that crosses over: if anything’s going to put prog into the actual mainstream, it’s something like this,” he said. “I don’t know who these Sleep Token cats are, but they’re accomplished, they’re writing big songs… it’s big and uncompromising, and I love it.”
Much more at the link.
I'll admit again that I'm not impressed by the theatrics. I like the music - well, I'm intrigued by it - in spite of their image and cultlike fan base.
That article mentions Justin Hawkins' YouTube channel and a video he did about Sleep Tokens' "Chokehold" so I looked for that...and discovered he did a second video about their second single this year, "The Summoning." Which I've already posted in reply 3. So I'll post "Chokehold" below, followed by Justin.Hawkins' two videos about the songs, since there's no point in reposting what I posted above.
= new reply since forum marked as read