Sleep formed in San Jose, California in 1990 — Al Cisneros, Matt Pike, Chris Hakius — and wrote the stoner doom playbook. Sleep's Holy Mountain is the classic, and Dopesmoker, the 63-minute single-track epic their label shelved, finally arrived in full and became legend. Dig into Sleep vinyl, CDs, and reissues at Wax Trax Records.
Sleep formed in San Jose, California in 1990 around Al Cisneros, Matt Pike, and Chris Hakius. They are widely cited as one of the foundational acts of stoner metal and doom metal alongside contemporaries like Kyuss, Electric Wizard, and Cathedral. Their 1992 album Sleep's Holy Mountain became a underground classic and established the foundational template for Black Sabbath-influenced stoner doom. The band signed with London Records and recorded Dopesmoker (1996), a 63-minute single-track album about a cannabis-fueled religious pilgrimage. London Records shelved the album over commercial concerns, releasing a truncated edit as Jerusalem (1999) before the band dissolved. The full Dopesmoker was finally released by Tee Pee Records in 2003 and re-released in a 2012 Southern Lord Recordings edition (with Al Cisneros-approved mix). The band reformed in 2009 with Jason Roeder (of Neurosis) replacing Hakius. Their 2018 album The Sciences - released without prior announcement on April 20 (4/20 cannabis holiday) - was their first studio LP in nineteen years. Matt Pike's parallel band High on Fire and Al Cisneros's parallel band Om have catalogs. Their foundational influence on stoner metal, doom metal, and broader extreme metal is widely cited.
Sleep's sound is foundational to stoner metal as a recognized genre - combining stoner metal, doom metal, sludge metal, drone, psychedelic rock, and heavy metal with Cisneros's distinctive vocal delivery (use of intoned, cannabis-themed lyrical content), Pike's signature distorted guitar work (Black Sabbath influence), and slow-tempo, dense compositional approaches drawing on Black Sabbath alongside contemporary doom metal traditions.
Original Earache, London Records, Tee Pee, Southern Lord, and Third Man Records pressings of the Sleep catalog are foundational items in doom metal collecting, with collector premiums on rare pressings. The various Dopesmoker editions (1996 unreleased / 1999 Jerusalem / 2003 Tee Pee / 2012 Southern Lord / 2022 Third Man) have collector interest.
Listeners new to Sleep typically start with Sleep's Holy Mountain (1992) or Dopesmoker (2012).
