Hi friends,

Being back in an office has been so weird. Not bad, to be honest, but undeniably an adjustment. I've made a "I'm like the new baby at the daycare" joke to multiple coworkers at this point, partly because it feels true and partly because, as one of the five oldest people in this very young office, it is my generationally appointed right to Dad-joke as freely as I want.

Really, I'm just grateful. I landed this opportunity when I needed it most, and everything is going well. Maybe it's the rose-colored glasses of prolonged unemployment, but I'm genuinely just happy to be here. 

And also: so profoundly sleepy. I previously predicted that returning to some sense of normalcy would help my content, but I did not account for how physically and emotionally draining a return to work would be, at least while I'm still adjusting. So, please continue to hold for my triumphant return to reading updates and video-making. The spirit is willing. The flesh is horizontal.

But newsletter updates? Newsletter updates seem to be exactly the thing my desk-bound brain is primed for.

Which brings me to my newest, possibly ill-advised, but definitely on-brand project. It hits so many of the things I love most in this world: a bit, a group project, starting a new thing, and thinking about things more deeply than they probably call for.

Now... you're contractually obligated to hear me out, okay? 

Starting today, I'm running a Sleep Token song bracket. Basically, I'll use a spinning wheel to select two tracks, I'll write about them, and then I'll choose my favorite of the two. Then, you'll vote on yours. The winner of the poll will move forward in the bracket. We'll go on this way until we have an ultimate winner or until you all get sick of me and stop voting, whichever comes first. 

Notifications will be OFF for this entire series. This is an act of love. I won't ambush your inbox with a ritual you might not care about. But that also means, if you do want to follow along, you'll have to check in daily. 

I am definitly biased, but I believe you don't have to be a Sleep Token fan to read these, and mostly because I imagine that these posts will be as much about myself, the other media I'm consuming, about craft and literary devices, and storytelling as much as they're about two songs. And, listen, if you've been meaning to try out their music, could I maybe interest you in two random songs a day? 

Okay, final thing I want to say before we dive in: Whenever I talk about how I rate or review books, I'll circle back around to evaluating things in terms of their quality and my enjoyment. I'd say that it's one of the great projects of my content to help people understand that you can like bad things and you can not like good things, and that quality and enjoyment are different, and that all of this is subjective. ("Bad" according to whose standards? Well, mine, of course. We are on my platform.)

I have a related thought about Sleep Token—not necessarily about quality, because I genuinely enjoy some aspect of all their music—but about the little Venn diagram in my head between the songs I find most listenable and the ones that are most lyrically impactful. The songs I'll throw on any single playlist vs the songs I can't listen to at my desk because I will cry.

I also have to confess that this, with you guys, is not the first time I'm playing this game. It started in a group chat when I randomly started sending Rachel and Natalie two songs a day and forced them to pick their favorites. We quickly found that the greatest moments of indecision came down to the song we liked better musically versus the one that meant more to us lyrically.

That tension—between what hits your ear first versus what hits your heart first—is part of what makes this bracket so fun for me, and what makes Sleep Token specifically an excellent band for this exercise. 

Round 1

Sugar
Album: Sundowning
Released: 2019

I love that I'm starting this series now, as I'm transitioning into a new job and trying to stitch myself back together after an incredibly difficult year. My Sleep Token obsession is the last artifact from my season of unemployment. (Not counting this depression apartment which, unfortunately, hasn't cleaned itself.) I found them in the final days of my swamp era, where I had endless time to sink into a new fixation and minimal will to do much of anything else.

The first time I tried listening to them, I did so normally; I pressed play on a song and waited to see if I liked it. (I didn't really.) The second time I tried listening to them, I did so with all that time on my hands. So even after I started with the EPs and nothing was happening, I just kept clicking around until I made it to their first full-length album, Sundowning.

I wish I could tell you the specific thing that clicked, but it was a little bit of everything all at once, like the lights coming on in a room you were making your way through by touch.

Let's bring back that partial list of things I fully love: a bit, a group project, starting a new thing, and thinking about things more deeply than they call for. So, it's probably not surprising that during my descent into this discography, I was texting Rachel basically every step of the way, turning this into... a group project. Mostly, it was a lot of in real time processing, including my very first attempt at ranking all of the songs on Sundowning. 

If I ranked them today, I don't think it would shake out that way, but "Sugar" was an early hook. It was also one of the first songs where my personal Sleep Token theories began to take shape.

Sleep Token is a band built around a fictional framework. It's comprised of a vocalist, known as Vessel, and the drummer, who goes by II. They are both masked and painted, and present their music as an offering to a deity known only as Sleep. In this lore, Sleep is a sort of ancient presence that came to Vessel in a dream and inspired the project. That mythos is taken more literally by some fans than others. I land somewhere in the middle, I suppose.

Pretty early on, my conviction was that many of the songs attributed to being about Sleep the deity were mostly about human heart break, though another not insignificant portion were about wrestling with the cost of fame. I think the masks and the anonymity and the larger-than-life storytelling are aesthetic and coping mechanism. They are, in my humble hypothesis, the vehicles through which Sleep Token can perform without fully sacrificing the people behind the project.

I was texting Rachel all of this (paragraphs, essays, incoherent rambles), pointing out lines that felt like Vessel talking about the experience of mining grief for art and putting himself on display while simultaneously hiding. And every time I'd get excited and send her another thought, she just kept replying, "Wait until you get to 'Caramel.'" (I won't jump ahead here to "Caramel," but if you've never heard the song, it is Vessel at his most direct, fully talking to us, the audience.)

I'm only a little ashamed to admit I didn't immediately connect "Sugar" and "Caramel" then, despite them being, you know… quite literally connected. It wasn't until recently that I went "oh!" when the "Sugar" artwork on Spotify changed and to look more like the badge for "Caramel," that it truly clicked.

Is that irrefutable proof that the lyrics of "Sugar" exist in that liminal space between grief and creation? That the "taste" is the addictive cycle of opening the wound and offering it up again and again? Maybe not. But it's true in my heart.

I think "Sugar" is about performance just as much as "Caramel" is.

Do you wanna see how far it goes?
Do you wanna test me now, my love?
You must be crazy if you think that I will give in so easily
Things we buried low
Coming to the surface now, my love
You must be crazy if you think that I will give up the game
Oh, sugar, I've got a taste for you now

At it's base, "Sugar" is about addiction, but there is a lot of room here for interpretation about what exactly that addiction is. I imagine some listeners will hear literal addiction, or addiction to the past love that is often the focal point of Sleep Token songs, or to Sleep itself. Whatever it may be, it isn't painted as particularly positive, but rather a returning to something that hurts, something that doesn't nourish you. 

Believe that though we never eat
We still know how to feed
We still know how to bleed

"Sugar" to me is an on any playlist song. It's an earworm as "Sugar, I've developed a taste for you now," is repeated over, and over again. And yet, it lands for me somwhere beneath the ribs because, oh, do I understand what it's like to try to plow an empty field as someone who deeply feels the need to make things. 

Jaws
Album: n/a, single
Released: 2018

In a bit of spinny-wheel fate, if "Sugar" was one of my earliest obsessions, "Jaws" is one of the more recent ones. I've had this one on repeat for weeks. Now, my goal throughout this project is not necessarily to compare our two random songs, but landing on "Sugar" and "Jaws" gives me the perfect opportunity to introduce one of my favorite recurring motifs: the mouth. 

My god, do they love their mouth stuff. And I don't just mean in a horny way (though, yes). (Argue with your mom.) But in Sleep Token's music, hunger shows up like a pulse. The lyrics repeatedly taste, swallow, bite, consume. And while the imagery repeats, the meaning shifts from song to song, though the throughline is mostly consistent: what we take in changes us. 

It is no small thing for a man this obsessed with ingestion to say, "I've developed a taste for you." Or, in the case of "Jaws":

Show me those pretty white jaws, show me where the delicate stops
Show me what you've lost, and why you're always taking it slow
Show me what wounds you've got, show me love

It's a striking ask for intimacy, specifically for the sharp parts. There is a way that Vessel understands the damage a mouth can do, and in turn begs for it. Or begs to be released from it. We'll see this repeatedly. The things Vessel wants, the things he fears, the things he worships, the things he's trying to get over, the things he's trying to forget, he swallows, or at least, he wishes he could, or at least, he wishes he could push it out again.

And "Jaws" sits right in the middle of that contradiction. The song keeps circling the idea that closeness is dangerous, but distance is worse. That being bitten is bearable if it means you're being seen, and being spared might actually be the lonelier outcome.

Are you watching me, with eyes of a predator
As you move towards the door?

That's devastating to me, this idea that someone could look at you so intensely and with that much unspoken promise, violent as it may be, and yet their body is already moving away.

And so, what haunts this song is the reminder that you could be willing to offer yourself entirely to someone and still, somehow, come away untouched.

Musically, "Jaws" feels like a song that hinges Sleep Token's discography, connecting the lingering sound of Vessel's pre-Sleep Token work with the more metal and alternative style that starts crystallizing on Sundowning.

There's a repeating riff here that kind of reminds me of an ambulance, or at least of the cadence of a rising alarm. Starting around 4:15, once the lyrics end, the whole song seems to break open. The drums come in with a kind of desperation, and then, just when it reaches that point where it feels like it can't coil any tighter, everything pulls back. The intensity drains out, the drums soften, and the track returns to the quiet, steady pulse it began with.

Today's winner for me? It's close, and maybe if you asked me next week, the answer would be different. But today, it's"Jaws" for the lines "And I'm not here to be the saviour you long for / Only the one you don't," and for that outro. 

I should be packing for Thanksgiving travel as I have precious time left to do so before we leave on Saturday, but the spinny wheel waits for no man. 

Now it's your turn: Sugar or Jaws?

♥️

Marines

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