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Andy Ford
Sleep Token
Rock
Inside Sleep Token’s Record-Setting Crossover: ‘This Isn’t Some Niche Thing’
How anonymity, a fan-first rollout and buy-in from pop fans helped 'Even in Arcadia' score the biggest streaming week ever for a hard rock album.
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A English hard rock band that performs in masks and cloaks is not the type of artist that regularly visits the top of the Billboard 200 — yet anyone who had been paying attention to Sleep Token’s rise over the past few months knew that their fourth studio album, Even in Arcadia, was going to have a strong debut.
After years of building a fan base, expanding their lore and inching onto the Billboard charts with increasingly higher peaks, the group kicked off the year by scoring their first career Hot 100 entries, as well as quickly selling out a slew of fall arena dates. When Even in Arcadia was released on May 9, its album tracks flooded streaming charts, a clear sign that the early enthusiasm around the album had coalesced upon its release.
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Yet when the dust settled on its debut week, even the most bullish Sleep Token fan had to be pleasantly surprised: Even in Arcadiadebuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart dated May 24 with 127,000 equivalent album units, according to Luminate — good enough to not only score Sleep Token’s biggest chart week ever, but the biggest total for a hard rock album in nearly two years, as well as the largest streaming week ever for a hard rock album. It’s the type of debut that blows away even the most hyped-up prognostications, and immediately makes Sleep Token one of the biggest stories in rock this year. The album also debuted at No. 1 on the Canadian Hot 100 the same week.
The performance of this album cycle has “by far” surpassed expectations, RCA Records COO John Fleckenstein tells Billboard. Sleep Token — which debuted nearly a decade ago and has always remained under cover of anonymity, with band members never revealing their identities or speaking to the press — signed with RCA in early 2024 following the release of third album Take Me Back to Eden. That album became the band’s first to hit the Billboard 200, debuting at No. 16 in May 2023, and produced some of its first songs to hit the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart.
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Yet when “Emergence” — the six-and-a-half minute, multi-part prog-metal epic that opened the Arcadia era — debuted at No. 57 on the Hot 100 in March, thanks in part to some mind-boggling streaming numbers (9.9 million official U.S. streams from March 14-20, according to Luminate), RCA had to adjust its forecast for the commercial prospects for its host album, says Fleckenstein.
“We knew they were great, and they were potent,” he says. “But when ‘Emergence’ came out, that’s when we saw the reality of where the numbers had gotten to.”
“Emergence” was followed by “Caramel” — a more radio-friendly (yet no less audacious) single that somehow pulls off a fusion of rhythmic pop, shuffling reggaeton and a shrieking metal breakdown — and “Damocles,” Sleep Token’s version of a power ballad with twinkling pianos that morph into thundering guitars. Both of those songs hit the Hot 100 as well, at Nos. 34 and 47, respectively — and the fact that the second and third songs released from Even in Arcadia peaked higher than the first on the Hot 100 indicated to RCA that the host album was going to be a monster.
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“Everyday along the path into this album, we were more and more confident that this was a big deal,” says Fleckenstein. “We just don’t see that kind of fan behaviour and consistency, in terms of new music coming out.”
When RCA signed Sleep Token last year, Fleckenstein says that the two biggest indicators of the band’s upward trajectory were its rapid growth as a live act — the group leapt from clubs to theaters, and now to arenas, with strong ticket demand for each live run — and the online dedication of its fan base. The London natives have crafted a complex backstory over the year, with Sleep Token leader Vessel speaking of a higher power called Sleep and causing fans to parse through lyrics and messages to unlock new mysteries from their world.
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For the band’s new major-label partner, Sleep Token’s anonymity has felt “liberating” as a promotional tool, says Fleckenstein, particularly in an era of artists oversharing on social media platforms. “So much of it is about the art that the band makes,” he notes. “The world that’s being created is being driven by the fans, and as we were building [the rollout] with the band, the part that was so rewarding was that we could not get more clever than this fan base.”
Case in point: in February, before the album cycle had truly started, the band launched a teaser site full of jumbled numbers and letters, which fans quickly found out related to the geographic coordinates of an 18th century monument in England. “It all happened in a blink!” Fleckenstein says with a laugh. “It’s because you’ve got a fan base that is undyingly passionate about this band.”
Now that Even in Arcadia is here, fans’ attention will now turn to how the album will be presented live: Sleep Token will perform the new material for the first time next month at a handful of European festivals before their U.S. arena tour kicks off on Sept. 16. In the meantime, the noise of this album debut has already unlocked opportunities for Sleep Token that aren’t normally reserved for hard rock acts: Vessel was featured as the main image of Spotify’s New Music Friday playlist on release day, for instance, and all 10 of the album’s tracks have made the Hot 100 chart. Combined with Ghost’s new album Skeletá debuting atop the Billboard 200 two weeks prior to Arcadia, a brand of new-school hard rock with baked-in mystique and accessible hooks is experiencing a mainstream boom that’s been years in the making.
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“The numbers here are basically in line with high-caliber pop artists, in terms of consumption level,” says Fleckenstein of Sleep Token. “Up until this point, the focus has been on the fan base, and that won’t change — they’re the reason why we’re here… But in a lot of ways, the story from here will probably be that this isn’t some niche thing. There’s definitely a broader awakening here among media and partners that are looking at this in a different kind of way.”
A similar effect is trickling down to pop fans, too. “There are people that haven’t discovered this band yet, because they haven’t been part of the lore and they perceive it as metal, which may not be their genre of choice,” Fleckenstein says. “But it’s great music. And I think that’s going to be the road ahead.”
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