“Caramel“, the second single to be released ahead of Sleep Token‘s chart-topping fourth studio album “Even In Arcadia” has been named the best song of 2025 by The New York Times — or at least the top track of the year by that publication’s veteran music journalist Jon Caramanica. Speaking of that song in the freshly published story linked above, Caramanica offered:
‘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” first arrived online on April 04th of this year and is currently up for ‘Best Rock Song’ at the 2026 GRAMMY Awards. An unconventional mixture of metal, dream-pop, reggaeton, rap, and more, the song’s lyrical content tackles the masked group’s struggles with fans ignoring personal boundaries and engaging in significant invasions of privacy.
You may recall a few years back that obsessive Sleep Token fans went so far as leaking identifying documents of the band’s members online, leading to subsequent threats of real-life stalking.
In a sense, it’s thought that “Caramel” gives Sleep Token‘s account of weathering that troubling situation. The twinkling, dreamy pop like sections of “Caramel” seemingly mirror that initial starry-eyed adoration of the group’s fans. However, as the song lyrics begin to descend into more sardonic territory, vocalist, etc. Vessel‘s words increasingly become laden with the lament of his carefully constructed wall of mystery being eroded; the so-called proverbial cost of him “tryna hide in the limelight”.
Despite topping the charts and selling out arenas, Sleep Token have gone to considerable lengths to keep their personal lives private, and the struggles to keep up that mystery have clearly taken a toll. As Vessel more vividly recalls the unwanted price of the toxic elements of stardom, the aggression of the track ramps up to match it.
In essence, you have the musical equivalent of someone being pushed to their limit, resulting in a visceral explosion of bellowing screams, primal riffing and thunderous double bass towards the end of the track. Regardless of your personal opinion of the band’s material itself, the thematic elements of this song’s composition, and their choices in instrumentation matching the lyrical content, remain almost cinematic from a songwriting perspective.
