If you're lucky enough to have never heard a Sleep Token song before, allow me to give you some context: They're an anonymous British band who, by blending unexceptional metalcore with lots of nauseating soulful-white-boy vibrato, have become one of the most popular and defining heavy bands of the 2020s. They just put out their fourth full-length offering -- that's what they call their own records! -- titled Even In Arcadia, and regular Stereogum contributor Eli Enis wrote such a scathing pan of it that I had to listen for myself just to see if it was really that bad. Eli's right. It's really that bad. And yet, Even In Arcadia is currently the #1 album in America.
Even In Arcadia, Sleep Token's debut for RCA, just landed at the top spot on the all-genre Billboard 200, unseating Bad Bunny's much more enjoyable Debí Tirar Más Fotos (it's also the #1 album in their native UK, too). Even In Arcadia also leads the Top Album Sales chart right now: It moved 127,000 equivalent album units in its first week, with 73,500 of those being album sales. Of those sales, 47,000 were vinyl, breaking the record for biggest vinyl sales week for a hard rock album -- which incidentally was last set just a couple of weeks ago with another theatrical European metal-ish band, Ghost, whose new album Skeletá also went #1.
The last time we saw two different hard rock albums go #1 on the Billboard 200 less than a month apart was over a decade ago in June 2013, when Queens Of The Stone Age’s ...Like Clockwork arrived back-to-back with Black Sabbath’s 13. Times are strange. Listen to one of Sleep Token's "offerings" below, if you must.
