The record expanded the band’s mysterious, genre-defying world to a larger audience
On this day 5 years ago, Sleep Token released their second album ‘This Place Will Become Your Tomb.’
Sleep Token expanded their mysterious, genre-defying world with their second studio album, This Place Will Become Your Tomb, released on September 24, 2021 through Spinefarm Records. Arriving two years after 2019’s Sundowning, the album pushed the anonymous British collective’s combination of alternative metal, progressive music, electronic pop and R&B into a darker and more immersive direction. Once again working with producer George Lever, Sleep Token began recording under unusually difficult circumstances: Lever later revealed that the first day of work on the album coincided with the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom, leaving the musicians effectively isolated together at Middle Farm Studios.
Lever helped give the record its enormous sense of space, making extensive use of long plate reverbs and layered production, while Vessel’s piano, keyboards, guitars and expressive vocals were contrasted by II’s intricate drumming and crushing rhythmic passages. Compared with Sundowning, the finished album was heavier and more tightly integrated, with different genres often colliding within individual songs rather than existing as separate stylistic experiments. Tracks such as “Alkaline,” “Hypnosis” and “The Love You Want” demonstrated that evolution, while the largely vocal-driven “Fall for Me” showed just how far Sleep Token were willing to move away from conventional metal.
This Place Will Become Your Tomb received generally positive reviews while also reinforcing how difficult Sleep Token were to categorize. Critics frequently praised the record’s emotional intensity, atmosphere and willingness to move between massive downtuned guitars, electronic textures, piano balladry and pop and R&B influences. Its reputation strengthened through the end of the year, making several ‘top albums’ year-end lists. The accompanying live shows demonstrated that the growing online interest was translating into a dedicated audience, with Sleep Token’s November 2021 UK tour selling out, including a major performance at London’s O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire.
Commercially, This Place Will Become Your Tomb represented an important breakthrough for Sleep Token even though the band had not yet reached the extraordinary level of popularity that would follow Take Me Back to Eden in 2023. The album became their first release to enter the main UK Albums Chart, debuting and peaking at No. 39 and spending one week in the Top 100; it also reached No. 13 in Scotland and topped the UK Rock & Metal Albums Chart.
More importantly, the record established much of the musical foundation for Sleep Token’s subsequent rise. Its combination of emotionally vulnerable songwriting, polished electronic production, R&B-influenced vocals and sudden bursts of punishing metal made the group increasingly difficult to fit into any single scene, while songs such as “Alkaline,” “Hypnosis” and “The Love You Want” became enduring pieces of their catalog.
In retrospect, This Place Will Become Your Tomb stands as the crucial middle chapter between the introduction of Sleep Token’s full-length vision on Sundowning and the worldwide breakthrough of Take Me Back to Eden—the album on which the band refined its contrasts of intimacy and heaviness into a distinctive sound that would soon attract a dramatically larger audience.