Sleep Token Wins New York Times Best Song Of 2025 With ‘Caramel’

The New York Times has shared its Best Songs of 2025, and surprisingly, Sleep Token’s genre-blending ‘Caramel’ has claimed the top spot.

Sleep Token’s ‘Caramel’ has been named The New York Times’ best song of 2025.

Taken from the fourth studio album Even In Arcadia, ‘Caramel’ would serve as the band’s second single released in promotion for the album. The track yet again showed off the band’s ability to blend genres, merging reggae with metalcore, R&B, and elements of progressive metal.

As any drummer will tell you, ‘Caramel’ was a – from ‘ii’, fusing the syncopated grooves of afrobeats with his staple polyrhythmic playing to usher the song into its epic chorus.

Despite being a weirder track from Sleep Token, it’s surprisingly caught on to become one of the band’s most recognised songs.

As The New York Times very own music journalist Jon Caramanica would go on to describe the track as,

“‘A huge, gloriously silly and brutally effective amalgam of abandoned styles ripe for reinvigorating — rap-metal, dream-prog, pop-reggaeton, backpack hip-hop, cosplay rock, metalcore and more.’”

‘Caramel’, the band’s song of the year, is a statement in itself, as the track pushes back against fans’ obsessive curiosity in trying to unveil their real identities. In 2024, a subsection of fans online would leak sensitive documents relating to band members’ identities, which resulted in threats of stalking.

Sleep Token’s popularity has only continued to grow following the release of Even In Arcadia, which has gone on to win Revolver‘s Album of the Year award and scored a Best Metal Performance Grammy nod for the track ‘Emergence’.

The band would also earn a second nomination for Best Rock Song for ‘Caramel’, which is shaping up to be a stacked category. Sleep Token will be up against Nine Inch Nails, Hayley Williams, Turnstile and Yungblud for the award.

Given the band’s placement here in the New York Times list, and the growing accolades the masked-metal group are receiving, I’d say bets on the band taking home the big award are pretty high.