Even in Arcadia

Even in Arcadia is the upcoming fourth studio album by anonymous English rock band Sleep Token, due for release on 9 May 2025. This will be the bands first release under new record label RCA Records. The album has garnered a lot of media attention from the unorthodox marketing the band has undertaken, including clues, codes, puzzles, real world locations and media outlets such as WRAL weather providing hints to release dates and album singles all with references to the lore the band intertwines into their music.

Background and release

On 18 February 2025, Sleep Token created their first official TikTok account and for their first post, captioned it with a mysterious website titled "Show Me How to Dance Forever". The website displayed a floral pink/grey aesthetic among previous era architecture, with seemingly random letters scrambled across the screen that needed to be entered in a specific sequence. Fans of the band found in the source code of the website a code arrangement depicting an archway and location coordinates that led to the 18th-century Shepherd's Monument in the grounds of Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire, England, below a mirror image of Nicolas Poussin's painting of the Shepherds of Arcadia. The inscription on the monument is the unsolved Shugborough inscription cypher which was discovered to be the correct arrangement on the website. Once users entered this correctly, a black flamingo appears, and they are then asked to provide their email address. Users were then greeted with a message "With Gratitude" and then sent an email titled "BEHOLD, A DIVIDE", with two options available to click, "House Veridian" and "Feathered Host" each with their own distinct logo and colour scheme. Both image links, when followed, led to the band's merchandise website. A second email was then sent that placed the user within the "house" of whichever link they initially followed.

On 26 February 2025, another email was sent out with links to two newly created Instagram accounts, each representing House Veridian and Feathered Host. Both accounts then posted images of identical sheet music. These eventually went viral with thousands of fans recording their interpretation of the sheet music on various instruments and programs and uploading them to social media platforms. It was later discovered that the House Veridian version of the sheet music had the Latin words septuagesimus and secundus which translates to "72nd" and each word was placed on the 3rd and 13th measure of the sheet music. This led fans following these clues to believe something would happen on the 72nd day of the year which also equates to the date 13/3 or 13th March, which also coincided with a blood moon lunar eclipse.

On 7 March 2025, Sleep Token officially teased new material via their official Instagram page as well as the two House Instagram accounts, showing the black flamingo surrounded by flowers in front of old, gothic-like architecture with the caption "Prepare for a new offering", and a link to pre-save a song on streaming services. On the same day, each house Instagram account shared a Morse code snippet, with both translating to more location coordinates nearby each other at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. Fans who followed this and visited the locations found QR codes with the logo of each house on them. These QR codes both scanned as the words "Blood" and "Moon" with the assets for each showing a number, which when entered as a cipher, revealed the word "EMERGENCE".

On 10 March 2025, music venues/arenas around the United States began to change their social media profile pictures to one of the logos for the two houses. At the same time, billboards with the new aesthetic found on the website began appearing around the US, with the line "Have you waited long for me?" and these music venues then began posting teaser reels with the same line. This led fans to believe a new tour was about to be announced.

On 13 March 2025, Sleep Token announced a brand new, 10 track album titled Even in Arcadia, due for release 9 May 2025. At the same time they dropped the first single from it, titled "Emergence" available on all streaming services. A new tour of the United States was announced with confirmed dates and a new website with brand new merchandise available to pre-order was launched.

At this time, weatherman Chris Michaels who features as the morning meteorologist for the WRAL-TV network, and is known for subtly incorporating lyrics from metal bands into his TV reports, took to Instagram, sharing a clip with Sleep Token's logo on the screen behind him with Emergence playing and the caption: "Prepare. 3/29". Following from this, he dropped a further teaser on that date asking us to "Prepare" in his report and that something is "Developing later in the week". On the screen behind him showed various cities in the region with "Behold, an offering" at the top. Some of the cities were missing characters and fans were quick to figure out the missing letters spelt out "CARAMEL" and then worked out that an example of sugar pyrolysis would result in caramel formation. Several days after, the official Sleep Token and house Instagram accounts shared a new reel very similar to the one that teased "Emergence", this time with the black flamingo walking inside one of these buildings in the Arcadia garden aesthetic, with the message: "Prepare. Caramel. 4/4". Following this teaser, all streaming services revealed "Caramel" to be Track 5 on the new album, confirming it as the second single from the album.

4 April 2025, Sleep Token officially released their second single from the album, Caramel on all streaming services. The song became the bands highest charting single across multiple countries around the globe, making it their most successful release to date. The song is often compared to the performance convention of "breaking the fourth wall", where for the first time, Vessel is not singing from a place associated with the lore and story they have built up over the years, but from the very personal perspective of the man behind the mask. The song deals with the dichotomy of fame, the good and the bad that comes with a meteoric rise in the spotlight, the stress that brings to the band members' personal lives as they increasingly struggle to remain anonymous as they gain in notoriety, but also acknowledges that in hindsight, maybe this should have been seen coming and that even with these negatives, they still love what they do and will continue through those trials.