II | Sleep Token's masked drummer

The most-awarded drummer in Drumeo’s history has never given an interview, never shown his face, and is known only by a Roman numeral.

II is Sleep Token’s drummer. In 2023 he won Drummer Of The Year, Drum Recording Of The Year and Metal Drummer Of The Year. In 2025 he won all three again.

Nobody outside the band knows who he is, and this page is not going to speculate. Here is what he actually plays.

Who is II?

II is the drummer of Sleep Token, the British band who emerged from the UK underground in the late 2010s and became one of the biggest rock acts in the world without ever appearing unmasked.

The members are known only as Vessel (vocals), II (drums), III (bass) and IV (guitar), with the Espera backing vocalists. Their identities have never been officially confirmed.

A note on that, because it matters: names circulate online, and none of them have been confirmed by the band. We are not going to print unverified claims about a musician who has deliberately chosen not to be identified. If that changes, and it comes from the band, we will update this page.

The records

Sundowning (2019), This Place Will Become Your Tomb (2021), Take Me Back To Eden (2023) and Even In Arcadia (2025).

Even In Arcadia was the breakthrough at scale: number one in both the UK and the US — the band’s first in either country — plus Grammy nominations for Best Metal Performance (“Emergence”) and Best Rock Song (“Caramel”).

They headlined Download Festival in June 2025, closing the Saturday with a two-hour set, and took the record into US arenas that autumn.

What II actually does

He plays across four genres in one song. Sleep Token’s music moves between R&B, ambient pop, prog and full-blown metal, sometimes within a single track. The drummer has to be idiomatic in all of them and make the transitions feel inevitable.

His R&B playing is the underrated part. Everybody notices the heavy sections. The quiet ones — the loose, laid-back, ghost-note-heavy grooves that carry most of “Aqua Regia” or “Caramel” — are much harder to play well, and much rarer in a metal band.

He plays for space. Even in the heaviest passages there are gaps. Sleep Token’s arrangements are built on dynamics and he is disciplined about it.

The fills are compositional. They mark structure rather than showing off, which is why they land so hard when they arrive.

He is exceptionally clean. Every note is articulate, at every dynamic. That is the thing you notice most on a good pair of headphones.

II’s drum kit

The rig is unusually well documented for an anonymous musician, because MixWave released a sampled drum library of it in 2025.

• Drums — DW Collector’s Series, with exotic hybrid shells.
• Cymbals — Istanbul Agop, and this is the interesting part: 11 hand-selected cymbals, all Turkish and hand-hammered. Dark crashes (Traditional Dark, OM, Xist Ion and Xist Dry Dark Brilliant models), several stacks, and an Idris Muhammad signature ride.

That last detail is worth pausing on. Idris Muhammad was a New Orleans jazz and soul drummer, and his signature ride is a dry, dark, jazz cymbal. A metal band’s most-awarded drummer chose it — which tells you more about how II thinks than any amount of double-kick footage would.

Every era, with buy links, is on II’s Rig Vault page.

Want the sound without the rig?

This sound is much more about cymbals than most metal is, and that is a cheap lesson to learn.

Buy dark, dry, hand-hammered cymbals. Turkish-made — Istanbul, Bosphorus, or the darker end of the big brands. They sit under a heavy guitar without turning the mix to white noise, and they still work in a quiet R&B section. Most metal cymbal setups cannot do the second thing. Our cymbal buying guide covers what hand-hammering does.

Then build a stack or two. Short, ugly, structural. Half the accents in this band’s music come off a stack rather than a crash.

And practise playing quietly. The heavy parts on a Sleep Token record are only heavy because of what precedes them. The Gear Guru will spec the kit; the dynamics are on you.

Where to start listening

• “The Summoning” (2023). The one that broke them, and it contains four different drummers’ worth of playing.
• “Aqua Regia” (2023). The R&B side, and the hardest thing on the record to play well.
• “Caramel” (2025). Grammy-nominated, and almost entirely about restraint.
• “Emergence” (2025). The heavy end.
• The Download 2025 headline set. Two hours, and the drumming holds all of it together.

Final thoughts

There is something quietly satisfying about the fact that the most decorated drummer of the last five years is somebody whose face nobody has seen.

It forces the conversation back onto the playing, which is where it should be — and the playing is genuinely extraordinary. Very few drummers could cover that stylistic range at all, let alone that cleanly, let alone while a band goes from clubs to Download headliner in six years.

Six Drumeo awards, no interviews, one Roman numeral.

See II’s full rig in the Rig Vault, or read about Mario Duplantier — another metal drummer whose best quality is knowing what to leave out.