The 2026 Grammy nominations took a violent turn toward the abyss today when the Recording Academy suddenly removed Sleep Token from the Best Metal Performance category—replacing them with a band no one in the mainstream had ever heard of until about five minutes ago: Aterra, hailing from North Carolina.
The Academy’s decision reportedly came after a late-night “sound calibration” session in which committee members were reviewing all the nominees through what one technician called “a speaker possessed by Satan.”
“They were halfway through Sleep Token’s ‘Emergence’ when the power flickered,” said one witness. “Then someone screamed, ‘That’s enough candlecore!’ and threw the playlist into a literal fire. Two minutes later, someone blasted Aterra’s ‘We Hate Your God’—and the entire boardroom started vibrating. People were crying. One intern started speaking in tongues. It was… metal.”
Shortly afterward, the Recording Academy issued an urgent press release at 3:33 a.m. (naturally):
“After experiencing Aterra’s ‘We Hate Your God,’ we have reassessed what constitutes a metal performance. The category now reflects the intensity, sincerity, and risk of third-degree burns required for true artistry.”
Aterra’s anonymous representative (whose official title in the band bio reads “screamer and conduit of blasphemy”) responded on Instagram Stories with a grainy photo of a bonfire and the caption:
“We didn’t want this. The light crawled to us. 🕯️🩸✝️↯”
(The cross emoji reportedly inverted itself in real time.)
Their 2025 album, Where the Light Cannot Reach, is a swirling cathedral of blackened fury recorded in one take “beneath a condemned church.” Its lead single, “We Hate Your God,” is a 4,666-minute, throat-shredding invocation that apparently made one Grammy voter “bonkers, then clap.”
Predictably, the internet is imploding:
Sleep Token fans are mourning the “ambient oppression” era.
Metalheads are celebrating with captions like “Finally, something that sounds like frostbite.”
And one confused voter on X wrote: “They screamed at me for seven minutes straight. I think I’m saved.”
The revised category now reads:
Best Metal Performance
“Night Terror” – Dream Theater
“Lachryma” – Ghost
“We Hate Your God” – Aterra 🕯️🩸✝️
“Soft Spine” – Spiritbox
“Birds” – Turnstile
Whether Aterra actually shows up to the February 1st ceremony at Crypto.com Arena remains unclear. Their spokesperson merely said the band will attend “if the Academy agrees to kill the lights, salt the stage, and let them scream until dawn.”
As one shaken Recording Academy member whispered before vanishing into the fog:
“We just wanted to include metal. Now we’re praying for mercy.”
