As the world reacted to ‘Emergence’, the first taste of Sleep Token‘s new album ‘Even In Arcadia’, we gathered together a group of experts from across the musical spectrum to get their analysis of this latest offering.

You can read the full feature inside our new Sleep Token special edition magazine but here is a little taste of what our panel made of the track:

EDWIN OUTWATER

A world renowned conductor, Outwater is the Music Director of the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music and in 2019 collaborated with Metallica on their ‘S&M2’ project.

“All the solos, all the melodies, they sound like they are from somewhere you know but they don’t sound derivative. There’s some really interesting songwriting there. Every moment reminds me of everything in a way, and I think that’s intentional on the part of the band…You’re in a prog metal ballad from the beginning and it’s things you’ve heard before, but then it transforms into something new and something different. I think they know this, since they’re literally calling out genres like trap or hip hop or whatever, It’s all in there, and they know that. So it’s not like they’re being lazy, they’re actually playing with this on purpose. The way the song is successful is that it is full of references constantly, and intentionally, but it still sounds like a different thing.”

SHAUN MICHAUD

A guitarist and composer, Michaud is an Assistant Professor at the famous Berklee College Of Music.

“I was surprised at how it started out like a pop track. The melody hit me and I went, ‘Wow, that sounds like Taylor Swift’. As I’m going through it, I figured out the chords real quick and jumped through the melody and it’s in the delivery of the cadence, the timing and the resolution of the notes against the chord changes. That is something that Taylor Swift does an amazing job with and I love that about her music...The harmonies feel so tight and the timbre goes so strange on that hook of ‘go ahead and wrap your arms around me, arms around me’. When it hits that spot, there’s a lot of textures in there, and they’re all amazing ear candy…I think that this is another reason why Sleep Token is interesting, because of the range of styles that are blended into one thing. I swear I heard some Duran Duran in there. I heard Toto and King Crimson and all that stuff. But also I immediately hear modern pop in there, and pop from all kinds of genres. So I think that’s what is most striking about it. And as an engineer too, it is just so well recorded.”

KYLE MACDONALD

An expert in all things classical music, Macdonald became widely known online for his Classical Kyle reaction video series, interviewing artists from the world of hip hop and R’N’B. 

“I confess it was my very first time listening to Sleep Token, or anything in this style. I often listen to pop and rock music to listen to the parallels with baroque music – in harmony, counterpoint and structure. However, with this one, I was straight into my other love: opera. Dramatically it’s worthy of the opera house. The singer’s baritone voice has great sonority, that hits you like it’s Tchaikovsky. I love the drama of the shifts in the instrumentation, from piano, to gentle guitar, then to full metal orchestration. I think part of the effectiveness of the song comes in the harmony – the slow rate of harmonic change becomes the glue that holds together the journey through so many vocal and instrumental styles.”

SIMON HALL

Hall is Associate Professor and Head Of Music Technology at the UK’s Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.

“It’s centered around E natural minor, which has got all sorts of quite interesting connotations. There’s a musicologist going back to the early 1900s, he was a pianist, musicologist and composer, a guy called Ernst Pauer, and he categorizes E minor as representing grief, mournfulness and restlessness of spirit…There’s many different influences that they’re taking on, but they are still very much within that metal sound in terms of the drum production. The guitars sound massive, that wall of sound is very nicely executed. But it is the journey it takes you on and that centre of the natural minor and 126 beats per minute. It just always gives you that cohesion. So it doesn’t disappear off into that sort of bonkers land that something like a ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ does. It maintains that structural coherence. It’s clever.”

Get your copy of our Sleep Token special edition ‘Even In Arcadia’ 36 page magazine for the full feature and so much more, available to preorder now at SHOP.ROCKSOUND.TV.