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
Maybe I’m stupid, but they sound like metal to me. I mean don’t get .e wrong, very with much pop appeal and in their own niche with rnb, dnb, soul and funk influence but I have a real hard time calling them anything else.
I suppose it’s subjective I just don’t see it. All of their songs that I’ve heard were like 90% indie pop/dance/electronica and like 10% sort of metal-ish if you squint at it guitars.
That’s so interesting because for me it’s the opposite. I’ve been listening to lots of indie (indie rock, electronic indie), EDM (melodub, dnb, future garage, electro house, …) and metal (very mainstream and new school metalcore, e.g. new architects, some bmth, novelists, senna, underoath, imminence, spiritbox, …).
They are bang on in there. Definitely very mainstream produced, the singing is almost theatrical with pop performance feats, but then again sometimes heavy screams. The rifds are heavy and low, although very interspersed with samples, ethnic instruments and elements, …
What I’m trying to say is, you will find lots of random things in their arrangement, but everything that generally makes metal is in there. And because that is the most defining feature, there is no way for me to put this up in softer genres. Genres, where I would expect artists like Tennyson, Young the Giant, Paper Idol, Robotaki, AJR, Dreamers, or the xx. These are just two different worlds for me, and the metal core artists, although of course very distinct just fit better with Sleep Token.
The only other genre I could see is alternative but for me the sound still differs too much. And because people need to genres to understand how to categorize artists, I feel like putting them in the general category of metal is warranted.
Sry I’m not trying to win an argument, just expanding on where I’m coming from. Please don’t take this the wrong way, I can definitely see why they stick out a lot when you put them in metal, and that’s something that does make sense to me.
Hey no judgment here. I don’t hate Sleep Token per se, to me the bulk of what they do just doesn’t sound like “metal”. They’re good musicians and once I stopped listening to them expecting to hear metal I actually did enjoy some of the piano and vocals stuff and some of the more atmospheric tracks. One of the most recent albums I got really excited about was a black metal/flamenco crossover band from Chile that I’m sure most of the metal heads I know will instantly despise lol