Masks, Make-Up & Fantastical Lore: How Bands Like Sleep Token and Ghost Are Helping the Kids Get Off Their Phones and Live in the Moment

On a sleepy Monday nighttime successful Brooklyn, Sleep Token’s masked and enigmatic pb vocalist Vessel floats retired to greet the pantheon of followers who person gathered to spot him astatine Barclays Center. Despite the Monday blues wafting done the halls of the arena, the specified show of him causes a lethargic assemblage to erupt into pandemonium. The band’s legion of supporters person shown up successful droves to enactment their masked crusaders, doused successful ethereal achromatic cloaks, fishnets, lace, masks, and different Token-esque attire, arsenic if they were wearing their favourite player’s jersey to an NFL location game.

This level of devotion is hardly uncommon for Sleep Token fans, who person spent the amended portion of 5 years supporting, deciphering, and succumbing to the anonymous band’s euphony and shows, which they telephone “Rituals.” But from the outside, this level of cultish reverence for a rock set successful 2025 feels some caller and nostalgic, harkening backmost to the days erstwhile specified bands ruled the world. Not to mention, amazingly fewer phones illuminated Barclays Center that nighttime — indicating that the crowd, ranging from young to old, was genuinely mislaid successful this moment.

If anyone’s taken a peek astatine the charts this year, it’s wide that stone — peculiarly quirky, thematic, mysterious and left-of-center stone — has had a colossal 2025. Sleep Token and Ghost some etched No. 1 albums connected the Billboard 200 earlier this year, seasoned metallic set Deftones released its tenth workplace medium to immoderate of the biggest numbers of its career, and adjacent the pop-leaning stone enactment Twenty One Pilots scored a career-best chart-topper earlier successful September with Breach. Sure, popular and hip-hop whitethorn inactive yet predominate the apical 40 arena, but the gentle upswing successful popularity for a genre agelong clowned for being dormant is evidently noteworthy.

All signs constituent to a renewed and still-building involvement successful much theatrical aspects of heavier rock: masked frontmen, mythical lore, makeup, world-building, and melodramatic storytelling. In the eyes of Courtney LaPlante, pb vocalist of the fashionable progressive metallic set Spiritbox, this revitalization is based astir however receptive young radical person go to fantastical contented successful general.

“I deliberation that kids are conscionable truthful overmuch much unfastened and little adjacent minded astir what creation they’re consuming,” LaPlante says successful a telephone to Billboard. “It’s not chill to dislike idiosyncratic for being weird anymore. It’s not chill to beryllium similar the chill kid successful people making amusive of the goth kid for liking [’90s gothic met...