They literally are not a metal band lol As a lifelong fan of all things in the metal genre I decided to try listening to them just to see what the fuss was about. I listed to most of 2 albums. One seemed to shift from new age to indie to something that sounded like the soundtrack to a movie, the other mostly sounded like electro pop music.
Both albums had short segments of sort of heavy nü metal sounding guitars kind of tacked on almost like an after thought. It seemed completely disjointed and the various parts didn’t really fit together at all.
If you like this kind of music fine, I’m not going to tell people what to listen to. Some of it was actually pretty good here and there. I just don’t understand this overwhelming need people seem to have to call them a “metal” band. Why would anyone want to call it that? They seem like one of those bands that would prefer not to be pigeonholed into a genre.
It’s almost like if you had a band make an hour long album of classical piano music and the composer stopped every 10 minutes to recite some bland sanitized rap lyrics for 30 seconds and everyone decided it was the greatest hip hop record of the decade
I think part of it is that metal can be very genre-fluid compared to other styles of music, so when people hear the metal parts they’re quick to accept it as that. One of the first things new metal listeners learn is that there are a thousand subgenres.
I kind of loosely place them in the metal category in my mind. Even though they’re really a lot more like Bon Iver with the occasional metal passage.
I love all kinds of avant garde and cross over and post-metal stuff that pushes the genre to its breaking point, Sleep Token seems more like they never intended to play any heavy music in the first place though. I’m not sure why they even bother with the heavy parts of the songs since it seems so jarringly out of place with the majority of what’s on their albums
Yeah I kind of agree. Their mellow side certainly seems to outweigh the metal parts from what I’ve listened to. I guess the artist felt that was the best way to express what they wanted to express, even if you and I don’t really “get” that part of their vision.