With 'Even In Arcadia,' has Sleep Token cracked the code for metal in the streaming era?

Los Angeles Times

4 days ago

The bestselling album in America last week came from an experimental British metal band that hides its members' faces behind cloaks and cybersigil masks. They call their anonymous frontperson 'Vessel' and backing band by roman numerals. They profess to be emissaries of a deity called 'Sleep,' and title songs like 'The Night Does Not Belong to God.' They don't do interviews and seem to loathe fame.
Despite all that cryptic lore (or perhaps because of it), Sleep Token's RCA Records debut 'Even In Arcadia' crushed the Billboard 200 this month, breaking genre streaming records en route to become the bestselling hard-rock album since Metallica in 2023.
'We knew coming in that we had something pretty big, based on the incredible engagement and live dates,' said RCA Records' chief operating officer John Fleckenstein. But 'Arcadia's' chart-topping debut 'went way beyond even those expectations. This is so much bigger than even we realized.'
They've had company atop that chart recently. The veteran Swedish hard-rock group Ghost — also evilly masked and grimly aliased — claimed its first No. 1 LP with 'Skeletá' in May too. Both bands got there after years building devoted, insular fandoms, while also serving as entry points into the genre for newcomers.
Is it a coincidence that these bands hit No. 1 in the same month? Or is there something chaotic in American culture that's craving brutal, escapist and lore-driven rock again?
'Metal has been around for a long time, the scene is very vibrant and loyal and it's never gone anywhere,' Fleckenstein sad. 'But the metal world has been centered around album sales and physical purchases. With Sleep Token, we're seeing what we don't ever see — streaming numbers from fans acting like pop consumers.'
'I wouldn't be surprised if we started seeing some babies named Vessel in a year,' Fleckenstein said, laughing. 'That's the kind of fan investment here.'
The last time two metal-aligned acts hit the top of the Billboard 200 chart in the same year was in 2019, when Slipknot and Tool each earned a third No. 1 album. Both of those acts are veteran bestsellers and have headlined festivals for decades.
The fact that Sleep Token and Ghost arrived with their first Billboard 200 bestsellers in 2025 suggests that there's a changing of the guard in the genre, where still-rising acts can hit chart milestones last seen in the nu-metal wave of the late '90s and early 2000s.
First up in May was Ghost's 'Skeletá,' the sixth album from the band led by singer Papa V Perpetua (a.k.a. founder Tobias Forge), with a backing band of Nameless Ghouls. The band's satanic imagery is campy; its sound is indebted to '80s chuggers like Judas Priest and Pentagram, like on its recent single 'Satanized.'
The band, signed to L.A. indie label Loma Vista, released its first album in 2010 and hit No. 2 on the Billboard 200 with 2022's 'Impera.' The band won a Grammy for metal performance in 2023 after four nominations.
'We are, at the end of the day, an occult, pop, satanic sort of rock 'n' roll band meant to entertain a group of people who are already down with that stuff,' Forge told The Times in 2022. 'This is the world that you hide in after school. And now there's someone coming in there trying to … evolve? It's disruptive.'
'Skeletá' topped the chart with 86,000 units in its first week. With 89% of that figure coming from sales, rather than than streams, they proved that a Swiftian array of physical media could triumph — they offered 15 vinyl variants of the album. It was the first hard-rock album to score a band's first Billboard 200 win since 2015.
Sleep Token's 'Even In Arcadia' reclaimed the spot for metal two weeks later.
The London-based band is still officially anonymous (though the band members' identities are widely debated online). Its enormous, melancholy and melodic sound pulls from electronic music, jazz, hip-hop and ambient, landing between the dazed crunch of Deftones and growl of Meshuggah, sharing Gen Z's genre-agnostic outlook.
The band's neo-pagan masks, gilded broadswords and necrotic body paint make them look more evil than they sound (they've covered Whitney Houston's 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody'). But they parlayed their goth-opera imagery into a ravenous fandom, coming out of the pandemic to sell out arenas and major festival dates around the world.
The band first hit the album chart with 2023's 'Take Me Back to Eden,' and the Hot 100 debut in March with 'Emergence.' They currently have all 10 songs from 'Arcadia' on the latter chart, with 'Caramel' cresting at 34.
'Arcadia' topped the Billboard 200 with 127,000 units, but the mix of sales and streaming suggested a different dynamic than the album-buying metal audience. The band sold 73,500 albums in its opening week, including 47,000 vinyl LPs — the most of any hard rock band in the modern era. But it also hit 53,000 streaming equivalent albums (nearly 69 million on-demand official streams) in its first week — the most for any hard rock album, ever.
'What we're seeing are superfans who are not just passionate, they're streaming the album eight, nine, 10 times, which looks more like the ways people stream the biggest pop stars,' Fleckenstein said. He called the timing right after Ghost's chart-topping album 'coincidental,' but said that 'seeing fans be so adventurous, getting a taste for this music, it wouldn't surprise me if you see other experimental and courageous acts like them.'
He attributes Sleep Token's chart performance to the ferocious online community the band built by being absolutely opaque about its identity, but ever more intricate in its aesthetic. The band's Reddit page, 166,000 members strong, is a daily torrent of fan tattoos of the band's logo, Vessel cosplay outfits and memes of Sleep Token lyrics dropped into scenes of 'Twilight.'
Vessel's lyrics seem disquieted by the attention, though. On 'Caramel,' they lament, 'This stage is a prison / Too young to get bitter over it all,' and on 'Damocles,' they drolly admit, 'Well I know I should be touring / I know these chords are boring / But I can't always be killing the game.'
That mix of emotional candor and personal distance feels enticing in an overexposed TikTok era.
'We are all living in world where very few things aren't disclosed, and I have to think that there's some level of exhaustion with that,' Fleckenstein said. 'Sleep Token really opens up possibilities for an alternate world, that allows people to create something bigger in the separation. The idea of privacy, true freedom of creative thought, maybe this all is part of a reaction tipping towards that.'
On the ground, L.A. record store owners say they're seeing these big acts turn the curious into genre lifers.
Sergio Amalfitano's independent record store Midnight Hour in San Fernando specializes in punk, metal and others harsh genres. 'Metal and adjacent heavy genres in general are having a huge moment currently,' Amalfitano said. 'Sleep Token and Ghost are mainstays here in the store. They seem to draw in the older metal fans as well as the new wave of fans. These are the entry level bands for a whole generation, opening up the genre to an influx of supporters.'
Amalfitano wouldn't be surprised to see more metal and hard-rock bands make similar climbs up the album charts soon. With modern hard-rock acts like Turnstile, Spiritbox, Poppy and Knocked Loose earning Grammy nominations, and metal bands like 200 Stab Wounds and Sanguisugabogg injecting young energy to classic heavy styles, they're speaking to a broader discontent within society through harsh, relevant sounds.
'These bands definitely have a crossover appeal, but at the same time, also a very rabid fan base,' Amalfitano said. 'I was in Mexico City when the new Ghost record came out and the lines were massive. There's a very big appeal all over the world, and it's not just a U.S. phenomenon.'
It's likely no coincidence that this wave is coming amidst a right-wing revanchist American government, though.
'A conservative wave in society tends to lead to a counter-wave of expression,' Amalfitano said. 'When it was the satanic panic, there was glam, heavy and black metal. There's always a response to mainstream politics, and music is the pendulum swing in effect.'
While Ghost doesn't have an L.A. date on the books for its 2025 arena tour yet, Sleep Token will play the Forum in September. Fleckenstein said the band has just begun to catch up to the huge demand for an appropriately-scaled live show in the U.S.
'What hasn't happened yet is bringing fans together in person,' Fleckenstein said. 'They're leaning into the album in a parasocial way, and what we're excited about is the impact when fans are in a room with other fans.'
It remains to be seen how long this moment will sustain, though. Morgan Wallen, a Billboard 200 chart fixture, has since reclaimed the top slot.
RCA still sees plenty of room for Sleep Token and its ilk to win freshly curious audiences, and conjure even more metal acts up the charts.
'Our job is just getting people to go down the rabbit hole,' he said. 'There will be a lot of new fans that grow up on Sleep Token, and I'd love to see this usher in a new wave. It's a paradigm change stretching the boundaries of what metal and pop can be. I don't think there's a stage big enough to contain what they have in their brains.'