Sleep Token is a music band from London that is considered to be one of the loudest events in music in recent years. The band was founded in 2016 and remains a mystery. All the members perform wearing masks and cloaks, which they categorically refuse to take off.
Sleep Token participants serve a certain entity known as Sleep – Sleep. The tokens are songs that serve as offerings to this entity. Only the vocalist has a name, and even that is conditional – Vessel.
The musicians also support mysticism with their stage images. Their appearance can be called occult: black cloaks, hoods, creepy masks just in the spirit of cultists, and hands painted with black paint.
No one has seen their faces, no one knows their names. The frontman calls himself Vessel, the other members are designated by numbers. Keeping the intrigue, none of them communicate with the audience either at the concerts or afterward. During the show, you can hear only a few words from Vessel and even those he runs through a voice-altering program.
The genre in which Sleep Token plays is impossible to define. In fact, it’s a mix of different styles, from jazz to heavy metal, indie, progressive metal, funk, R&B, techno metal, pop, post-rock, and even more.
The final touch to the atmosphere of Sleep Token is the band’s simple slogan: “Nothing lasts forever”. At some point, the band can simply disappear without any announcements or explanations. And it will be quite in the spirit of the history built by the musicians.
The band’s first album, Sundowning, was released in 2019 and immediately caught the attention of music critics from around the world. Already in 2021, This Place Will Become Your Tomb was released, which was recognized by Loudwire as the 12th best rock/metal album of 2021. And the third album Take Me Back To Eden was unveiled in 2023.
The album became the final part of the trilogy. Six tracks from “Take Me Back to Eden” were pre-released as singles and attracted huge attention – the number of listeners on the most famous music resource grew from 300 thousand to more than one and a half million within a month.
Take Me Back to Eden received mostly positive criticism and was highly praised by leading music publications, noting its unpredictability and multi-genre nature. Metal Hammer magazine, for example, labeled it as “Sleep Token’s strongest work to date, which not only expands the band’s universe and pushes the boundaries of metal”.
What is Sleep Token?
Sleep Token is the name of the British band, which was formed in 2016. Sleep Token is called “the most mysterious band”, and for a reason. They are anonymous, until today no one knows the faces of the musicians and their names.
In terms of visual identity, Sleep Token is as unique as the whole idea of the band. Sleep Token has its cipher and its alphabet, with short Lovecraft messages hiding behind them.
At first glance, the geometric minimalist logo of Sleep Token is just an abstraction made up of straight lines and complemented by an arch with a crown in the center. But if you look closely – in the straight lines you can find not just symbols, but runic letters, in which you can see not only Roman numerals, which serve as musicians’ names but also all the letters from the band’s name. As for the central element, the arch with five rays – it is still a mystery to the public, as well as the identities of the musicians behind the masks.
According to the band’s version, this logo was made up of runes, influenced by sleep. Which fits very well with the general concept of the Sleep Token band and their mysteriousness.
The sacred geometry of the Sleep Token emblem is sometimes accompanied by a laconic uppercase lettering, set in a clean and distinctive sand-serif font. The typeface, used for the inscription is a slightly modified Futura, with the letters placed far enough from each other.
As for the color palette of the Sleep Token visual identity, it is based on the combination of white and black, which is sometimes alternated with dark gray. And these shades suit the mysterious and sacral essence of the band better than anything else.