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 night in Brooklyn, Sleep Token’s masked and enigmatic lead singer Vessel floats out to greet the pantheon of followers who have gathered to see him at Barclays Center. Despite the Monday blues wafting through the halls of the arena, the mere sight of him causes a lethargic crowd to erupt into pandemonium. The band’s legion of supporters have shown up in droves to support their masked crusaders, doused in ethereal black cloaks, fishnets, lace, masks, and other Token-esque attire, as if they were wearing their favorite player’s jersey to an NFL home game.

This level of devotion is hardly uncommon for Sleep Token fans, who have spent the better part of five years supporting, deciphering, and succumbing to the anonymous band’s music and shows, which they call “Rituals.” But from the outside, this level of cultish reverence for a rock band in 2025 feels both new and nostalgic, harkening back to the days when such bands ruled the world. Not to mention, surprisingly few phones illuminated Barclays Center that night — indicating that the crowd, ranging from young to old, was truly lost in this moment.

If anyone’s taken a peek at the charts this year, it’s clear that rock — particularly quirky, thematic, mysterious and left-of-center rock — has had a colossal 2025. Sleep Token and Ghost both etched No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 earlier this year, veteran metal band Deftones released its tenth studio album to some of the biggest numbers of its career, and even the pop-leaning rock act Twenty One Pilots scored a career-best chart-topper earlier in September with Breach. Sure, pop and hip-hop may still ultimately dominate the top 40 arena, but the gentle upswing in popularity for a genre long clowned for being dead is obviously noteworthy.

All signs point to a renewed and still-building interest in more theatrical aspects of heavier rock: masked frontmen, mythical lore, makeup, world-building, and dramatic storytelling. In the eyes of Courtney LaPlante, lead singer of the popular progressive metal band Spiritbox, this revitalization is based around how receptive young people have become to fantastical content in general.

“I think that kids are just so much more open and less close minded about what art they’re consuming,” LaPlante says in a call to Billboard. “It’s not cool to dislike someone for being weird anymore. It’s not cool to be like the cool kid in class making fun of the goth kid for liking [’90s gothic metal band] Type 0 Negative. People want to show that they’re well rounded and that they have an eclectic music taste… And that makes me very happy, because I think that’s one of the things that’s been missing from metal music in the last decade or so — the youth listener.”

Occurring in tandem with all this is a reduced and/or carefully articulated social media presence among these costumed rockers — a move that just a few years ago would have alienated younger fans long accustomed to that parasocial relationship. Sleep Token, Ghost and even an enigmatic new U.K. metal band called PRESIDENT — who in the last four months have accumulated over a million monthly listeners on Spotify, and next year will perform at the O2 Forum Kentish Town — merely use their Instagram accounts to announce new music and post some recap content from their shows. Instead of alienating young people with these approaches, it’s only made them more committed to the music and art itself.

Other rockers are starting to notice this positive trend, and theorize about why the kids are connecting so hard with bands who aren’t remotely humanized. “Artist culture and influencer culture have just completely merged together,” LaPlante offers. “And I think there are so many layers to it, but I think that one of the things is neither of these artists have ever been less accessible to the fans and the public before. I think people now, especially the younger generation, [social media] is no longer starting to feel authentic to them — because I think at this point they’re smart enough to understand that these parasocial relationships are really just trying to sell them something.”

Younger audiences’ interests in the mythical and the unknown may be partially driven by a steady generational shift away from social media. According to reporting done by The Guardian back in March, two-thirds of 16-to 24-year-olds in the U.K. — where Sleep Token and PRESIDENT hail from —think social media does more harm than good. Half of them think they spent too much time on it when they were younger, with regret highest among participants who skewed younger. Four in five participants also said they’d keep their own children away from social media as long as possible if they were parents.

“The big grievance of the Millennials is that we can’t afford to buy a house, but the Gen Z’ers’ big grievance is that social media ruined their childhood,” Tobias Forge of Ghost calmly tells Billboard. “I do believe, I promise, you’re gonna see a big rebellion against this. Not now, not tomorrow, but when they’re in their 20s. Social media and connectivity in that way are gonna be so lame because it’s hindered their development. It’s hindered their freedom! It’s hindered so many things for them. If I can somehow be part of giving people the idea that there was a world before this s–t… and that it worked really well! We had tons of fun! It was actually amazing!”

While one would assume these bands’ faceless appearances might actively sabotage prospective fan connections to them, it’s instead made them the perfect vessel — pun absolutely intended — for young people’s emotional experiences. During a politically tumultuous time, bands like Sleep Token, Ghost and PRESIDENT provide the perfect means of escape. Young people are able to slip into a world where they can project their trauma and frustrations onto the musician — and because that musician has no name or humanizing features, it melds to them like glue.

“It’s kinda like reading a book,” Claudio Sanchez, lead singer and guitarist of the narrative-driven prog-emo rock band Coheed and Cambria, explains. “Sometimes you want your main character to be almost featureless, someone that you can see yourself in, and the fact that you’re donning a mask — anybody could be under there. So as a listener you want that connection to be yours and yours alone, and by not having a human identity attached to it, it gives you that stronger connection.”

Aaron Stern, VP of marketing at Sleep Token’s RCA label adds that the political moment has a lot to do with the resurgence of metal and rock in the mainstream.

“For me there are two pieces that are happening,” Stern says. “One is the cyclical nature of music trends. Genres kind of come and go, and fortunately I think there is a real resurgence in rock music and guitar-based music, and a lot of young fans sort of discovering the genre for the first time, which is fueling them to go and not only consume catalogues but also consume a lot of the new artists coming out of the genre.”

Stern also offers a second explanation about how rock fits in with the exhausting political atmosphere.

“I mean, you pick up your phone and turn on the TV or wherever you get your news, and we’re all living through something that’s been quite incredibly difficult,” Stern continues. “I think that historically there’s no better genre than rock music as far as bringing in authenticity to the moment. The visceral and raw sort of nature of that genre in particular is also what allows us to fight through those trying times. A band like Sleep Token provides not only the music itself and the truth and reality of things but also just a place to escape to and a different world to experience things in, other than the one we’re living in now.”

The detailed and expansive narratives that drive these bands are also what helps keep their fans lost in their worlds. Dozens and dozens of videos, Reddit threads, and personal essays can be found across the internet deciphering Sleep Token’s lore — which includes warring factions, religious deities, cryptic runes and ancient underworld civilizations — and Ghost’s lore became so popular Forge even started putting out a coinciding comic book series.

“My daughter has a word for when you’re dreaming and fantasizing while awake. You know that?” Forge asks. He’s unable to think of the word himself. “It’s a Gen Z thing. Anyways, most people live lives where the hours and the chores that you’re doing are simply not enough to occupy your mind. You need to be a very grounded person, sort of running for your life, to be perfectly caught up in the moment to the point where you don’t need fantasy. Most of us, doing our day-to-day routines, we need fantasy. We need distraction, and that’s not a bad or unnatural thing.”

Young people’s immersion in metal and rock also makes sense, considering that ever since the genre’s inception, it’s been the safest place for all these fantastical world-building energies to exist. From the grand shock rock of the late Ozzy Osbourne to the bizarre character-based lineage of KISS, to the elaborate costumes of Slipknot and Mudvayne, rock fans haven’t really cared whether their favorite musicians exist in this current reality. It also makes it easier on the artists themselves to make authentic art, so it’s kinda a win-win.

“For me it, allowed me to be as honest as I possibly could in the music,” says Sanchez, whose Coheed and Cambria has made a career-long parallel with a long-running science-fiction epic written by Sanchez and his wife. “I just had a really hard time being the focal point of a rock band. It wasn’t how I came up. So when I fell into that role, this was a way for me to feel comfortable and secure in executing this… Yeah, I’m not wearing the Sleep Token stuff, but I’m creating a mythology that would allow me to hide my true self inside of.”

“I think it just starts from Alice Cooper and the need to shock in some way,” LaPlante adds. “There’s some people that I think just have a really big appreciation for production elements. So there’s some of us that are very passionate about that and some people that are more passionate about just kind of letting the songs speak for itself and not having anything big or fancy on stage. Or maybe a little bit of both?”

Of course, with mainstream appeal comes criticism, and each of these aforementioned bands listed has continued to push back against archaic definitions of what does and does not make them rock. Download Festival founder Andy Copping was forced to respond to criticism over billing Sleep Token as one of this year’s headliners, standing by the band as the next big thing despite pushback from attendees. Elsewhere, Pitchfork obliterated Sleep Token’s Even in Arcadia album, scoring it a 2.3 and decreeing it as a “bumbling composite of generic pop and trendy metalcore [that’s] both schmaltzy and dull: a vacant wasteland where joy, excitement and intrigue…go to die.”

But metal and theatrical rock has long been subject to such criticism, having existed on the fringes since the very beginning. As the genres have grown in popularity, the gatekeepers have continued to tighten their parameters — but the truth is, experimentation is what makes rock music in all its forms… rock.

“I think that it’s hard for people to think of a metal band writing a nonmetal song or a nonmetal band having elements of metal in their song,” LaPlante says. “I think that any culture that started out as a niche culture is very protective of someone appropriating that aspect of the music to use it in a non-like authentic way to feel ‘edgy’ or whatever. And I feel that people are very scared of that. I think that’s why there’s always this validation of needing to be — and I’m using air quotes right now — metal. And for me I think it’s great for the listener to determine what metal is and for the artist to not really care and for something becoming metal or not.”

What matters most is that in these alternate worlds, young people are being accepted no matter how quirky or weird they are, and the universes being constructed are so engrossing that fans feel less inclined to disappear back into their phones. And just in case they are tempted, Ghost has adopted a strict no-phones policy at its shows.

“It’s in a way, parenting,” Forge concludes about the phone ban. “People come away feeling relieved. Look how nice it feels to not have your phone for two hours. People are mind-blown!”