If this were any other workplace, this wouldn't exist.

If this were any other group of people, we would recognize how completely unhinged this behavior is.

I have spent years studying Sleep Token. Not casually. I have spent an unreasonable amount of time pulling apart the work, looking at patterns, asking questions, building theories, getting things wrong, correcting them, and then asking more questions.There is one part of Sleep Token I have deliberately avoided for almost all of that time.

The bullshit.

The interpersonal history. The factions. The gossip. Who hates whom. Who did what to whom. Who deserves credit. Who deserves blame. The endless mythology that has grown around real people because, somewhere along the way, being interested in a band apparently became permission to appoint yourself judge, jury, biographer and executioner.

I didn't want any part of it. Partly because it wasn't what interested me. Mostly because I wasn't there. Neither were most of you.

There are things we can know. There are public statements. There are credits. There are dates and records and things people have chosen to say. There are also allegations, interpretations, incomplete accounts, missing context, old wounds, competing perspectives and stories repeated so many times that eventually people stop remembering which parts were established and which parts were somebody's interpretation of somebody else's version of events.

That is not unique to Sleep Token.

What is remarkable is what people have decided they're entitled to do with it.

Because now there is Arcus. A new body of work. A new group of artists.

There are nine of them.

Nine.

And I have watched people take whatever anger they have accumulated around Sleep Token's former working partners and dump it at the feet of an entirely new creative project.

I've watched people decide they want it to fail. Not because they listened to the music and hated it. Not because they think the project is poorly made. Not because the concept doesn't interest them. Not because they dislike the vocals or the production or the lyrics or the imagery.

Because of a single person they associate with it.

And somehow, the other human beings standing beside that association have become... acceptable collateral damage?

So I have a very simple question:
What the fuck did they do to you?

Seriously.

What did they do?

If this were a normal workplace, imagine explaining this behavior out loud.

Imagine discovering that someone at a new company had previously worked somewhere else, with someone you admire. You have strong opinions about how that previous professional relationship ended. You have read things about it. You have chosen which version you believe.

So you decide the new company should fail. You attack its work. You attack the people willing to work there. You try to make sure other people won't support it. You hope opportunities disappear. You warn strangers away, not because of anything the new group has done, but because you've decided everyone associated with one person deserves the consequences of your judgment.

In virtually any other context, people would look at you like you'd lost your fucking mind.

But apparently if everybody involved makes music, this becomes fandom.

No.

It doesn't.

You are allowed to hate it.

This shouldn't need clarification, but apparently we're going to cover the entire remedial course.

You do not owe Arcus your support.
You don't have to listen to them.
You don't have to join the community. Frankly, we probably didn't want you there anyway.
You don't have to participate in anything.
You don't have to like Death.

You can think the song is terrible. You can think the lyrics are overwrought. You can hate the vocals. You can hate the production. You can think the whole project is pretentious as fuck.

Criticize the art.

Please.

Art gets released into the world and people get to have opinions about it. That's the transaction.

You can also decide that someone's involvement means you personally don't want anything to do with the project. That's your boundary.

But there is a difference between:
“I don't want to support this.”

and

“I want to make sure nobody else can.”

There is a difference between withdrawing your own participation and actively trying to destroy someone else's opportunity to participate. There is a difference between criticism and punishment. And there is a particularly enormous difference between holding one person responsible for something you believe they did and deciding everyone willing to create something alongside them deserves punishment too.

You know that.

We all fucking know that.

We simply stop applying the rule when one particular fandom gets involved.

We do not know these people.

That sentence matters.

A mask doesn't change it. A username doesn't change it. A photograph doesn't change it. Ten thousand hours listening to someone's music doesn't change it.

Feeling profoundly connected to someone's work does not create a reciprocal personal relationship with the person who made it. And loving someone's art does not deputize you to fight their battles.

You are allowed to care about Sleep Token deeply.
You are allowed to believe that people involved in its history were treated badly.
You are allowed to have opinions about that history.

But you are allowed to love Sleep Token without hating someone on their behalf.

Nobody appointed you.

Furthermore, the people you're supposedly defending are adults. Grown fucking men with mortgages and groceries to put away. They have agency. They have lawyers. They have professional relationships.

More importantly: They have private conversations you will never hear, context you will never possess, mistakes you will never know about, kindnesses you will never witness, and entire lives that exist beyond the tiny pieces of the characters they made available for public consumption.

So does everybody else involved.

Turning one person into a saint and another into a monster doesn't honor either of them.

It turns human beings into characters.

And once you've turned them into characters, it becomes remarkably easy to forget that consequences happen to the humans underneath.

And that's the part I can't get past.

Because I've seen the comments now. For years, I didn't look. I wasn't interested.

I wanted to study the work, not the interpersonal wreckage around the people who made it. And maybe that insulated me from understanding just how ugly some of this had become.

There is criticism.
There is anger.
There is resentment.

And then there is the kind of language people use when they've stopped conceptualizing the target as a human fucking being.

Wanting someone never to work again.
Wanting anything they touch to fail.
Celebrating suffering.
Wishing harm.
Treating the destruction of somebody's ability to create as though it would constitute justice.

And now watching some of that hostility spill outward onto an entire group of people because of association.

That isn't criticism. It isn't accountability. And it certainly isn't protecting your favorite band.

It's cruelty with fandom branding.

I am not asking you to change your version of history.

This is important.

I'm not presenting a counter-history here.
I'm not telling you who's right.
I'm not telling you who's wrong.
I'm not asking you to forgive anyone.
I'm not asking you to reconsider whatever conclusions you've reached about events you believe happened.

I'm not going to hand you another neat story with the heroes and villains switched around.

In fact, for the sake of argument, keep your version.

Assume every conclusion you've reached is correct.
Assume every person you've trusted about the past has described it perfectly.
Assume you've correctly assigned every ounce of blame.

Fine.

Now answer the question.

What did the other people do?

Because if your answer is nothing, then what exactly are you doing?

If these people did nothing to you, harmed nobody you know, and weren't involved in the history you're angry about, why is their work acceptable collateral damage?

Why should their creative effort be judged according to your relationship with another band?

Why should they inherit somebody else's enemies?

Why should they have to answer for a story they weren't part of?

And perhaps most importantly:
Why do you think you're entitled to make them?

These are people.

It's an embarrassingly simple point.

Artists are people.

Musicians are people.

The people whose names you know are people.
The people whose names you don't know are people.
The person whose work changed your life is a person.
The person you have decided to hate is also a person.

People are contradictory.
They hurt each other.
They misunderstand each other.
They remember things differently.
They make selfish decisions.
They make generous ones nobody sees.
They fuck up.
They grow.
Sometimes they don't.

Sometimes two people can walk away from the same relationship carrying completely different accounts of what happened, and neither account will fit neatly into the mythology strangers eventually build around them.

You do not have to excuse harm to acknowledge humanity. Those ideas are not opposites. And accountability that requires you to stop recognizing someone's humanity isn't accountability anymore. It's vengeance. When that vengeance starts splashing onto people who weren't even there? We've wandered even farther from anything defensible.

Arcus gets to succeed or fail as Arcus.

Maybe people will love it.
Maybe they won't.

Maybe Death is the beginning of something extraordinary. (Personally, I am a big fan.)

Maybe five years from now everyone involved will look back and wonder what the hell they were thinking.

That's the risk of making something and putting it in front of strangers.

But those strangers should at least have the decency to judge the thing that was actually made.

People made something.

They deserve the opportunity to discover whether anyone wants what they made.
Not because they're entitled to success.
Nobody is.

Not because you owe them kindness disguised as praise.
You don't.
But because creative work deserves to encounter its audience without another fandom standing at the door screaming about a war from years ago.

Listen or don't.
Like it or don't.
Criticize it.
Ignore it.
Decide it's not for you.

But if you find yourself actively hoping a group of people's work collapses because you've decided one person among the people associated with it is your enemy, perhaps stop for a moment and consider how fucking strange that is.

And if you've gone further than that, if you've wished suffering on actual people, celebrated the possibility of their failure, tried to make others afraid to work with them, or decided that anyone standing nearby deserves whatever cruelty you can throw at them because you've appointed yourself soldier in somebody else's war...

Then I don't particularly care which band you love.
I don't care which version of the story you believe.
I don't care how righteous it feels from inside the crowd.

You should be ashamed of yourself.