For the past week or so, I’ve dedicated pretty much all of the time I usually spend reading to listening to Sleep Token. 

Honestly, I wish I could mark their discography as read on Goodreads, that’s how much time I’ve spent swimming in these lyrics, taking notes, looping the same tracks, and texting an equally obsessed friend (thank you, Rachel. Love you). 

Somewhere in the middle of that descent, I started to wonder whether there was anything here worth writing about, or at least, anything that people would care to read about, as this is a bit of a departure from my usual content. 

And, believe it or not, the thing that finally convinced me to write this was Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl. I'm no Taylor Swift fan. In fact, it’s an ongoing joke in my Discord that whenever she’s mentioned, I materialize immediately, gnawing at the bars of my enclosure, ready to talk my shit, but also trying to temper my dislike. There are only so many times I can yell that that lady needs to find the beat and befriend the melody.

Now, it wasn’t The Life of a Showgirl being bad that pushed me to write this. It’s been watching, over the last few days, as fans try to dissect its lyrics and composition, insisting that they’ve found some depth where I, personally, only heard shallows.

And honestly? Good for them. We’re living in a cultural moment where earnest engagement with art feels almost endangered. Everyone’s accusing everyone else of lacking media literacy, but most of the time, that’s just code for you had an opinion I didn’t like. (Which of course distracts from the fact that we are living through a literacy crisis. I believe that deeply.)

If people can spend time explaining how Taylor Swift actually understands Hamlet (honest, she does), then I can spend some time talking about performance as brand, self, wound, and worship.

So… thanks, Taylor, I guess.

(It is not lost on me that many of the themes seeded early in Sundowning, Sleep Token’s debut album, and later culminated in Even in Arcadia are what The Life of a Showgirl wishes it were capable of encapsulating—the performance of performance, the mirror held up to the person who, for their fans, also acts as mirror. Sleep Token and Taylor Swift are not two artists I thought would be occupying real estate in my brain at the same time, but it’s hard not to think about the identity of brand in both cases.)

I first heard of Sleep Token because Rachel (seriously, love you so much) was posting about Even in Arcadia, their 2025 release, a lot. On her recommendation, I gave the first song or so a listen and (obviously prematurely) decided it was not for me.

Then, TikTok did what it does and started feeding me Sleep Token content. As best as I can deduce, this started because they had a tour stop in Orlando, and as a South Floridian who is often in Orlando, my algorithm likes to keep me up to date on local happenings. 

And once I watched one video of this man hippity hopping across the stage, it was really all over for me from there. 

For the uninitiated (of which I was one, um, a week ago), Sleep Token is a band fronted by a masked figure known as Vessel, who claims to serve an ancient deity called Sleep, a being that came to him in a dream and to whom all the band’s music is a form of worship. 

That might sound gimmicky, and honestly, it is. Sorry, that’s my truth. There is something profoundly dorky about the entire enterprise. It’s the kind of theater that could easily be labelled as cringe in a social moment where anything earnest runs that risk.

But maybe that's why Sleep Token has given their sincerity a disguise. The robes, the masks, the cultish branding. It's mythos as armor.

Giving your band a mythos also means giving it a framework sturdy enough to hold almost any interpretation. (See: Taylor Swift. Her brand is now doing the heavy lifting for her. It doesn’t matter if what she’s saying is actually witty; her brand is wit. If a lyric lands awkwardly, the assumption is that it’s ironic. If something feels thin, it must be minimalist on purpose. That’s her mythology: the English teacher too clever for her own fans. The project is now about maintaining the illusion that there are always more layers to uncover, especially if you buy every variant, all the merchandise, and, of course, go watch the movie.)

For Sleep Token, this means that every lyric feels like it belongs to a larger cosmology. Sleep Token has built a world dense enough that listeners can step inside the music and rearrange it around their own meanings. One person hears a doomed romance between mortal and deity, another hears the anatomy of addiction, and yet another, the slow corrosion of devotion.

Personally, and again as a very new fan, I find it most interesting to consider Sleep less literally, as deity, and more to consider the metaphors and meanings beneath that presence, where lurks a conversation about art and artist and about the deliberate distance Vessel insists on keeping between himself and his creation.

There are so many things in our lives that can show up as godly when we idolize them, or feed them, when we let them dictate the shape of our days and the rhythm of our thoughts. Anything that demands sacrifice can eventually start to resemble worship. (Here’s an aside that is at least a little on brand: I’m reminded of Monstrillio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova, a novel in which a woman experiencing great grief after the loss of her son cuts out a piece of his lung and begins to feed it, creating a new sort of monster that is and is no longer her son.) 

We all know that music, especially at this scale, isn’t just about the music. Once you reach any level of visibility, it becomes about personhood as product, about the performance of self, the management of brand, and the unspoken contract between art and audience. 

And maybe this part is what’s hit me so hard. I’m nobody famous—just a person who posts her thoughts online for a few thousand people at most, but even I’ve had to reckon with that split between who I actually am and the curated, condensed version that people see for five or ten minutes at a time.

(I posted on Threads about finding The Life of a Showgirl mortifying. It made a lot of Swifties mad at me, and even brought out someone who seemed to generally dislike me to complain about my romantasy project. Don’t ask me how one connects to the other. The point of this aside is that I spent a good amount of time responding to them in a way that would probably make my best friend sad. She’s always telling me to stop replying to comments so much, for my own mental health, but I find that really hard to do. My biggest haters would probably say it’s because I need to be right, but to me, it’s more about that split. About watching myself or my words get misrepresented by someone with their own narrative to serve. Making things for public consumption means constantly seeing yourself through other people’s eyes, even when those eyes are determined to see you badly.)

Again, this is part of what I see in Sleep Token: a project obsessed with that split, or at least with the exchange you make when you decide to offer a piece of yourself up for consumption. You give something away—privacy, personhood, the softness of being known only by those who actually know you—and in return, you make something beyond yourself. Something people might hold close, even as it eats away at the person who made it. 

Sleep Token has taken that and enshrined it. 

We see that stage set early in Sundowning, their 2019 debut studio album. 

If you’ll allow a very new fan the room here to bring her own interpretation, I think that Sleep Token’s work is more often about grief, lost love, and mining that wound for performance than it is strictly about deity or mythology, though that is also certainly present. 

In fact, the name Sundowning gives us the immediate impression of a cycle, the inevitable movement from day to night, from lucidity to confusion, from memory to forgetting. In medical terms, sundowning refers to the agitation and disorientation that often occur at twilight for people living with dementia. For the album, I think we see this encapsulated in the lack of a linear story arc. Instead, we move through the “back and forth,” the sawing that creates the lacerations that define the record. Each track opens a wound, tends to it, then tears it back open again in time for the next one.

That’s the heart of Sundowning. It’s an album about getting stuck, about how loss doesn’t vanish but echoes. Anyone who’s ever tried to make something out of pain knows the pattern—the rush of saying it out loud, the hollow quiet that follows, and the strange urge to go back and dig around in the pain just one more time.

This is perhaps best encapsulated in “The Night Does Not Belong to God,” the first track that serves as a perfect prologue and thesis statement for everything that follows. Here, we establish both the grief and the bargain, the loss and the coping mechanism that will color so much of Sleep Token’s work. 

There’s no way of knowing if every song about loss in their discography is about the same loss, but it is easier to contextualize it that way for me, especially as so many of the motifs repeat according to the main subject of the song. I think I see a more mortal, human wound where others might more often read the relationship with Sleep as the subject. 

And, to be fair, the deeper we move into Sundowning, the harder it becomes to separate those two halves of the same coin. The loss is the worship. Grief turns into its own altar after a while. Vessel takes a wound and preserves it through song, sanctifies it through mythology, sings it until it becomes holy through performance. The more he tries to give it away—to Sleep, to the art, to the audience—the more the wound defines him.

I am in love with stories about grief.

Recently, I was on a livestream with Denise, the author of The Unmapping, the first book I published through my imprint. The Unmapping is a story with chaos as a set piece, but at its heart, it is about the characters who experience the external crisis as a launch point for internal transformation. She told us about a personal crossroads, where she had to make decisions to suffer that transformation and rethink her trajectory. Later in the conversation, we circled back to her own telling of this moment and how she had framed it for us as one of the great griefs of her life. She corrected herself to say that she had been through harder things, but this was the first thing that was, to put it succinctly, identity-rattling.

I have also experienced identity-rattling grief. It’s the kind of crisis that demands we redraw the map of who we are. It’s when you realize that the story you’ve been telling about yourself doesn’t quite fit anymore.

When I think of my own identity-rattling griefs, I remember how impossible it felt to try to articulate. It is lonely to hold something so heavy and invisible and to believe that no one could possibly understand how that feels. Of course, that’s rarely true, but in the middle of it, grief feels like a secret language only you can understand.

I think that’s why I love grief stories, both for the act of pulling the pain out of the body and giving it contour, and for the admiration I have for anyone who can manage to give it words.

There’s a kind of cruel honesty in how Sundowning treats grief. Each song feels like it’s made from the same handful of shattered pieces, held up to the light again and again, turned in different directions, always returning like night, like morning. The entire album is a cathedral built from broken things, and to me, that’s where the mythology meets creation. 

What we call worship in the language of Sleep Token is, I think, just another name for the artist’s bargain. It might be the good old evangelical conservatism coming through (truly not helped by all of the religious language and iconography present in this music), but I grew up around the idea that “worldly music” all came as a bargain with the devil. And in a way, maybe it does. Not in the literal, fire-and-brimstone sense I was taught, but in the quieter way that art always asks for a piece of the artist.

(This feels important to clarify: I don’t believe that we have to suffer to make meaningful art. I make the best things when I’m fed, housed, and financially secure. I have my best ideas when I have the space to think beyond survival. Pain can be a source, sure, but romanticizing the starving artist or the broken genius only ensures that fewer artists survive long enough to create their best work.)

(Which brings me back to Taylor Swift. People keep joking that her art has suffered because she’s happy now, as though joy were artistically sterile. I think that’s a dangerous myth to keep feeding. I’d go as far as saying that Taylor’s creative stagnation has less to do with happiness and more to do with disconnection. You don’t become a billionaire and hold on to very much of your humanity; in her case, not enough of it to make music with real stakes, perspective, or risk.)

This is the loop that defines Sundowning: love and art, devotion and exhaustion, creation and decay, remembering and forgetting, circling each other until they’re indistinguishable. 

To be clear, I am not rejecting mythology outright. I do ultimately think that a couple of songs on Sundowning feel explicitly dedicated to the ongoing relationship between Vessel and Sleep, whoever or whatever you take Sleep to be.

“The Offering” is the most literal act of worship, in my interpretation. Vessel sings, “This is a given, an offering / In your favor, a sacrifice in your name.” The language is priestly. It’s transactional. He’s expressing devotion and formalizing the exchange. “Take a bite of me just once.” The self becomes communion.

“Give” is the song that convinced me that, perhaps, sometimes, we are hearing Sleep talk back. It’s hard not to hear the deity’s voice calling for total honesty: “If you want to give, then give me all that you can give / All your darkest impulses and if / you want to give me anything then give / give in again.” 

However, in most of the songs, I see the relationship being explored not as the covenant itself but as the original wound that opens the door for that fool’s bargain. The identity-rattling grief. These, to me, are not hymns to Sleep; they’re love songs to the ache that made Sleep necessary.

The worship is what happens when the pain needs somewhere to go.

I can’t promise you this is the last you’ll hear from me about Sleep Token. I don’t have an entire document tracking motifs for nothing. 

♥️

Mari