2025's Biggest Musical Disappointment?

Reflections and Review: Even In Arcadia (2025) by Sleep Token

Looking back on my previous entries, it seems I have yet to publish a negative review on Substack, but there’s a first time for everything. Never would I ever have guessed that my first negative review here would be about an album made by one of my favorite bands…

I know that Sleep Token has amassed a lot of haters with their popularity explosion accompanying the 2023 release of Take Me Back to Eden, but I’m definitely not one of those people. I’ve appreciated the eclectic band ever since they released Sundowning in 2019. I think they honed in more of a signature sound with This Place Will Become Your Tomb in 2021, then evolved their sound to appeal to an even bigger audience with TMBTE. All three of these albums have special places in my heart, and I’ll probably end up reviewing some of them in the future.

With their pattern of releasing albums every two years, I shouldn’t have been too surprised when I learned that Sleep Token was coming out with a new one in 2025. I did think it was a bit soon to release something while a lot of people are still heavily enjoying TMBTE, and I was also afraid that the quality would suffer from what felt like a rushed release. However, hearing “Emergence” and “Caramel” for the first time excited me on their own as singles, and based on those, I predicted that Even in Arcadia would be one of my AOTY contenders.

Living on the west coast, I got access to EIA on Spotify after my closing shift right when it was turning midnight on the east coast, and I excitedly began listening to it on the drive home. My positive anticipation further continued as I heard Nintendo-esque instrumentation at the beginning of “Look to Windward,” which I maintain is somehow one of the band’s best pieces. It’s everything I look for from them, a blend of unexpected and progressive elements, a catchy melody, smooth mixture of metal and other subgenres including R&B and chiptune. However, to me, the best part of the song was actually the return of TPWBYT-era drum patterns in the heavier section, reminiscent of “Hypnosis,” one of my favorite songs by the band.

Afterward comes “Emergence,” which I think is standard Sleep Token fare, something that could have easily appeared on the previous album. It has a quite excellent saxophone solo at the end, but other than that, they don’t do anything particularly innovative. Sadly, the next two tracks that follow, “Past Self” and “Dangerous,” are absolute snoozers for me. The former sounds like a typical radio song with no distinguishing features other than Vessel’s vocal style. The latter starts out slow, some might call it “sexy,” and I can see how it would be catchy, but it’s not my thing. Perhaps it will grow on me with more listens, and it has some fun radio rock guitarwork toward the end, but the band has just done so much better in the past and I can’t help but feel a sense of disappointment.

Fortunately, my second favorite song on the album, “Caramel,” follows. It starts out sounding like a ballad, then after a minute, morphs into reggaeton. I do like the build-up and how it turns into one of the heaviest tracks (if not the heaviest, sadly) on the album right before the four-minute mark. Overall, it’s a well-done mixture of dance pop and, dare I say, blackgaze, with a lot in between, and that’s the more innovative sound I’m here for. I’d also say that the lyrics for this track in particular are much more intriguing than the rest of the album.

The next two songs are even more boring than “Past Self” and “Dangerous.” You’d expect the title track to be one of the best, like in the previous album, but “Even in Arcadia” is nothing but underwhelming, sounding like an interlude but lasting four and a half minutes long. “Provider” is quite corny and reminds me of my least favorite Bring Me the Horizon songs. One of the album singles, “Damocles,” plays afterward, a mid track that fortunately offers a slightly memorable and pleasant chorus. “Gethsemane” follows in the same path as “Damocles,” which feels to me like a boring song composed in the style of Sleep Token, but without the same “it factor” that their earlier works had.

The closing track, “Infinite Baths,” has some potential and good alternative metal instrumentation on the second half of the song, but much like the rest of the album, I find that it drags on a bit too long past its welcome. It would have been much more of an acceptable track on a debut album by the band, but this is their fourth and I feel as though it’s weaker than the majority of Sundowning. The whole experience of EIA leaves me overall feeling dissatisfied, as though I just had an unnourishing meal full of empty calories, such as eating dessert for breakfast, even if there are very enjoyable bites during certain parts of the experience. Dare I say, a lot of this album even feels like “coworker music” to me with its stale songwriting and lack of depth.

That being said, I’ll still continue to defend Sleep Token for being a great gateway band to those new to metal, and for being able to create a signature sound that defies sticking to just one genre. I haven’t lost any love for their first three albums, and I’ll continue to enjoy them even if I’m not going to add EIA to my rotation of regularly played music. I did add “Look to Windward,” “Emergence", and “Caramel” to my liked tracks and will be absorbing them more during my car rides. I may sound rather critical, but I just believe that the band can do better and I’m not a fan of the direction that they took this year. Things can change though, and if they decide to release another album in 2027, I hope they can get back to the sound they established in TMBTE, where they blended genres together more seamlessly within their songs rather than having a huge contrast between elements of soft and loud.