Is the future of pop...heavy metal?!

The UK outfit Sleep Token has done what we once thought impossible: Found commercial success playing heavy metal music in 2025 AD.

Their fourth studio album, Even in Arcadia, went to number one on the Billboard 200 upon its release, with all ten of its tracks charting on the Hot 100—this despite the fact that the band has been entirely masked and anonymous through their nine year existence.

Sleep Token's willingness to inject their brand of heavy metal with autotuned pop vocals, reggaeton beats, and hop hop inflected rhythms has widened their audience, but in the process had galvanized scathing criticism. Pitchfork gave the album a withering review calling Even in Arcadia "schmaltzy and dull," while Anthony Fantano dubbed the band "metal music for Disney adults."

We get to know Sleep Token—the music and the controversy—by listening deeply to the ways they toy with the genre conventions of metal, and ask whether they are changing the sound of pop in the process.

AUDIENCE SURVEY 2025: https://switchedonpop.typeform.com/survey2025

Songs Discussed

• Sleep Token - Thread the Needle, Emergence, Caramel, Damocles
• Ghost - Satanized
• Metallica - Hero of the Day
• Nickelback - How You Remind Me

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