Sleep

Sleep are the most revolutionary band in American doom metal. Jettisoning the funereal atmosphere long associated with the genre, the trio instead smother Black Sabbath-inspired churn in an underground sludge reflective of their roots in the Bay Area’s DIY scene. Before forming Sleep in 1990, guitarist and howler Matt Pike, bass player and screamer Al Cisneros and drummer Chris Hakius played in Asbestosdeath, who, like the Melvins, slowed hardcore riffs to an eardrum-drubbing crawl. If Sleep’s second album, the 1992 release Sleep’s Holy Mountain, made them a favourite among punks and skaters craving stoned heaviness, then 1999’s Jerusalem (later rereleased as Dopesmoker) turned them into metal gods. Consisting of a single gargantuan riff reshaped for roughly 60 minutes, the album is an epic hymn to cannabis as sacrament. In addition to radically expanding the parameters of doom metal, the recording profoundly impacted stoner rock and drone metal. By the early 2000s, Pike was helming the equally successful High On Fire, while Cisneros and Hakius formed the mystical-inspired Om. But Sleep regrouped (minus Hakius) for 2018’s The Sciences, an expert balance of expansive jams and shorter bursts of doom-metal transcendence.