Music critic Anthony Fantano has broken Sleep Token’s glowing accolades by ranking their fourth studio album, Even In Arcadia, as the third-worst album of 2025.
Sleep Token has quickly become one of the most recognised metal bands of this generation, and has only continued to grow in acclaim with each release.
Earlier this month, Revolver named the masked metal band’s fourth record, Even In Arcadia, its album of the year. The New York Times would also rank the album’s second lead single, ‘Caramel’, the number one song of the year.
However, that doesn’t mean they’re without staunch critics – one of which is the internet’s busiest music nerd, Anthony Fantano himself.
Fantano, who goes by TheNeedleDrop on YouTube, published their video “Worst Albums of 2025” yesterday (December 18). Fantano would immediately call the album an “absolutely trashy, annoying fusion of metal and pop and R&B,” admitting that he despised this genre blend on the band’s previous release, Take Me Back To Eden, and that he despises it even more in their follow-up.
The music critic would go on to lament the state of metal right now, sharing “If only the worst bands in this genre are the ones who are concerned with accessibility, then it’s going to be records like this that continue to be the most popular in metal, which is something that I would hate to continue seeing for the rest of this decade.”
Viewers who caught Fantano’s full review of Even In Arcadia were probably not surprised to find it in the music critic’s year-end list. In their review, Fantano would give the album a 2/10, stating that Sleep Token is “metal for Disney adults”, and would sort the album into the “Pop Reviews” playlist on his channel instead of metal.
He would go on to acknowledge that while the band does pull from a variety of genres, including metal, alternative rock, pop and R&B, he felt that Sleep Token isn’t “pulling from the best and brightest of what those genres have to offer when they’re working those elements into their own stuff.”
Plenty of vocal detractors of Sleep Token would decry the band’s alignment with metal. Even Pitchfork would pull out a rare mean article, calling Even In Arcadia “a vacant wasteland where joy, excitement, and intrigue… go to die.”
Even In Arcadia has gone on to become the band’s most successful release, launching their notoriety into the stratosphere, while also exposing them to even more passionate critics.
God Forbid’s Doc Coyle would come to the band’s defense earlier in the year, calling out what he calls “pretentious gatekeeping” in the metal world. He shared that the wholesale rejection of Sleep Token is not due to their artistic choices, but “the audacity to become the most popular rock act on earth with those choices”.
Coyle would also compare Sleep Token’s genre blending to Opeth‘s Damnation or Devin Townsend‘s “experimental side quests” that only received acclaim (forgetting the many years Opeth were panned for vocalist Mikael Åkerfeldt foregoing his iconic growls, or fans crying for Townsend to perform Strapping Young Lad material for a period of years).
As the year rounds up and music publications are offering their own placement of Sleep Token’s latest album, all this discourse does is cement the mysterious metal group as one of the most polarising and talked about bands around right now. With bands like PRESIDENT also showing up, taking inspiration from Sleep Token’s gimmick, perhaps Fantano’s fears about other metal bands chasing similar sounds and acclaim will only become more true in 2026.
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