Spotify has revealed that Sleep Token's Take Me Back To Eden was the most streamed new metal album of 2023.
The third studio album by the anonymous metal collective amassed a staggering 357,324,681 streams in 2023, eclipsing every other new album in the genre space.
Metallica's 72 Seasons was among the high-profile records to receive fewer streams than Take Me Back To Eden, with 72 Seasons totalling 227,202,107 streams in 2023.
An interesting element of the statistical breakdown is the vast differences in monthly listenership totals. Metallica has significantly more monthly listeners than Sleep Token overall with 24,708,038 to Sleep Token's 3,131,019 monthly total. These numbers indicate that Sleep Token fans were spinning the new record with near-religious fervour, while understandably given their extensive back catalogue, Metallica fans were incorporating the new tracks into their Metallica listening rotation.
With fan worship more intense than ever, and worldwide interest and intrigue growing at runaway speed, Sleep Token blew Australian audiences away on their anticipated first Australian headline tour in April which saw all shows sell out with a huge demand for more. Take Me Back To Eden debuted at #3 on the ARIA album charts and had fans and critics raving across the globe.
The record features some of the band's heaviest material to date, yet it stands out as a confident and explorative collection of music that highlights the band’s stunning chemistry and connection to music itself. It’s a chemistry that has been replicated brilliantly live, leading to wildly successful shows the world over, including selling out their December show at London’s iconic Wembley Arena in 10 minutes.
The band will return to Australia this year with Bring Me The Horizon.
Bring Me The Horizon
NEXGEN Down Under Tour
With Special Guests
Sleep Token
Make Them Suffer
Daine
Tickets from destroyalllines.com
Listen to Take Me Back To Eden
Metallica released 72 Seasons in April 2023. The highly anticipated release is the Bay Area thrash icons' first full-length offering since 2016's Hardwired... To Self Destruct. Produced by Greg Fidelman, the 12-track, 77-minute album is a concept record based on the impact of the first 18 years of life on the foundation of identity.
Frontman James Hetfield explains "72 seasons. The first 18 years of our lives that form our true or false selves. The concept that we were told 'who we are' by our parents. A possible pigeonholing around what kind of personality we are. I think the most interesting part of this is the continued study of those core beliefs and how it affects our perception of the world today. Much of our adult experience is a reenactment or reaction to these childhood experiences. Prisoners of childhood or breaking free of those bondages we carry."
The band hosted listening parties at cinemas across the globe, allowing fans to experience the record in full surround sound while viewing videos for every track. Those videos have since been shared on the band's YouTube.
A with all Metallica records, 72 Seasons arrived amidst great fanfare, with record stores opening late across the globe to allow eager fans the chance to get their hands on the holy grail, a new Metallica album, the minute the clock struck midnight. A quirk of timezones meant that one lucky fan in New Zealand, Jesse Saywell, was reportedly the first person in the world to purchase a physical copy from a store, giving him a pretty niche humble brag.
Listen to 72 Seasons
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