A Beginner’s Guide To Stoner Metal In Seven Incredible Albums
Get ready to melt your brains into a thin puddle of soup.
Stoner metal doesn’t have a bad reputation, precisely. It’s more like it has a restrictively specific one.
For the uninitiated, the mere existence of the genre sounds like something of a joke, playing into the stereotype of the metal fan as perpetual slacker, ripping bongs and blasting the same slow, momentous riffs.
And then there are the jokes about stoner metal actually sounds. More than most other sub-genres, it’s extremely easy to parody a stoner metal single — just play hard, slow, and for an obscenely long time.
But those in the mainstream compartmentalise stoner metal at their own expense. The genre follows no rules, and its titans are forever in the process of deconstructing, rather than building upon, those who came before them. Listen to a Saint Vitus record and then a Sleep record and tell me that either sounds like the other. The genre isn’t the narrow parody of itself it gets painted as. It’s an entire world.
Indeed, that’s precisely why it can be so hard to know where to start with the scene — there are so many bands putting out so much diverse music, that finding a clean entry point can be a struggle. Saying you like “stoner metal” is a little like saying you love the colour blue — a platitude so broad as to tell you very little.
Here then is the list to help you out — the seven albums to convert the non-believers. Clear several days out of your schedule, curl up on the couch with a nice pair of headphones, blast these masterpieces, and turn your brain into a thin, grey puddle of soup.
#1. Saint Vitus — Saint Vitus
Saint Vitus’ self-titled behemoth was birthed through controversy — though written and recorded in 1982, it was tied up in a legal battle that delayed its release for two years. Worse still, when it finally was unleashed upon the world, most were not ready for it: it didn’t get anything like the respect that it deserved, largely painted as a pale imitation of the unholy terror that Black Sabbath had spent the decade perfecting.
In hindsight, that critical shrug seems more ridiculous than ever. Saint Vitus isn’t only a perfectly composed work in and of itself, full of echoing, knotted choruses. It was also a game-changing release, spawning a handful of different sub-genres — including, notably, stoner metal. There’s a case to be made that the sub-genre would never have come to be without Saint Vitus. We owe them everything.
#2. Sleep — Dopesmoker
I know, I know — the “safe choice”. But can you imagine a list of pinnacles of the genre that didn’t include Sleep’s titanic opus, an hour and a bit of slow motion terror that acts as a kind of summa of an entire way of making music. Loud and slow, Dopesmoker is the sound of tectonic plates moving, or an entire car-yard being dropped onto your head.
No wonder that it caused such an explosion of experimentation in the scene after its release. There was clearly no way to top what Sleep had done, so the band’s contemporaries had to go weirder; stranger; more oblique. That means we don’t just have to thank Sleep for Dopesmoker. We have Sleep to thank for the things that happened in the scene for almost a decade after its release.
There’s really only one way to listen to this record. Put it on late at night, isolated and alone, and let it work its terrible kind of magic upon you.
#3. Electric Wizard — Dopethrone
Electric Wizard’s Dopethrone was the product of a terrible time in four young English men’s lives. Malnourished — by choice — and perpetually fucked up on an array of drugs, the band birthed a record that actively hates you.
“Most of us were stuck in some drug addiction or alcoholism at the time, and it was just pure hate,” the band’s Jus Oborn would later tell the press. “We [woke up] consumed as much fucking drugs as possible, and then just started jamming.”
To that end, Dopethrone is different from most of the other records on this list. For the most part, stoner metal is a genre that thrives in a kind of manic, enjoyable free play. There’s a sense of curiosity to the riffs on Dopesmoker, no matter how towering they become. Not so on Dopethrone. Dopethrone is a nuclear weapon of pure psychic mangling, assembled out of wire and bad acid trips.
Take your time with it — that first play is only ever going to be overwhelming.
#4. Weedeater — God Luck and Good Speed
There is perhaps no band as prone to misadventure as Weedeater. This is, after all, a group headed by a man who accidentally blew off his own big toe with a shotgun while recording one of their masterpieces, and who later busted up his own fingers while on tour.
But that sloppy, demented quality is also the precise appeal of their work. Compared to Weedeater, Sleep sound practically orderly — here, songs fall apart minutes in, eventually reassembling themselves out of rubble before unsticking all over again.
God Luck and Good Speed, the band’s magnum opus, sounds barely held together at all — the seven-minute long ‘F0r Evan’s Sake’ starts as a sub-Sabbath riff and then lights itself on fire. It’s as close as stoner metal comes to the anarchism of thrash or punk, a masterpiece that feels like its constantly trying to shove its own guts back into a huge slit in its stomach. Oh, and then it ends with a blues-inspired piano number. Because of course it does.
#5. Kyuss — Wretch
Kyuss walk the line between metal and rock, leading some devotees of the former artform to argue that they don’t meaningfully “count” as a stoner metal act. Yet such strict rule-keeping helps no one, particularly not stoner metal fans — the genre is at its best when it is straying from the norm, and calling some acts out of bounds just seems like it will make those boundaries so much more restrictive.
And hey, Kyuss’s intensity and length makes them stoner metal-esque enough for me. Wretch, their debut, released long before the band’s guitarist Josh Homme would find success as the lead singer of Queens of the Stone Age, is a terrible, portentous thing. It’s all great, but the snaking six minutes of ‘Son of A Bitch’ plays with form in a way that feels positively groundbreaking. Just listen as those opening riffs eventually ripple themselves out into something completely different, or that final minute, when the song throws itself into a new gear and begins to resemble a strange amalgam of Saint Vitus and Led Zeppelin.
It’s perfect, is what I’m saying. Let it melt your face off.
#6. Acid King — Zoroaster
Peter Lucas, the one-time bassist of Acid King, would leave the group after the release of Zoroaster. And sure, the band would make many masterpieces without him, going through multiple line-up changes and continuing to hone their grimy, thickened sound. But so many of the pleasures of Zoroaster belong to Lucas, and the bizarre sounds he drains out of his axe — ‘Evil Satan’, the album’s enjoyably hyperbolic opening tune, is held in place by his morse code-esque playing.
And then there’s the vocal work of the band’s Lori S., a series of screeched howls that sound like Chrissy Amphlett if she were a Satanist. ‘Tank’, one of the album’s shorter songs, is held entirely in place by her voice, which eventually degrades into a primal, vicious yelp. The whole thing sounds like a hex.
#7. Acid Bath — When The Kite String Pops
Acid Bath are to stoner metal as Queen are to pop. I’m extremely aware that will sound like a grand claim, but I don’t know how else to communicate the baroque, utterly bizarre stylings of When The Kite String Pops, a post-modern masterpiece that hops around the place like a cartoon character who has just taken a flaming hot poker to the ass. Fusing stoner metal with thrash, sludge, rock and yes, a drop or two of nu-metal, the whole thing’s an explosion of textures and odd, mutilated sounds.
As a result, it’s definitely the album on this list that you work your way up to — you’ll want to understand what precisely is being subverted before you submerge yourself in this antic piece of deconstruction. But after you’ve situated yourself in the genre, there are few greater highs than letting Acid Bath tear the ground messily away from your feet, and undo everything that you think you have learned.
Which, again, is the point. Stoner metal isn’t one thing. It’s an attitude towards making music, not a sound. And that’s why some of the greatest records in the stoner metal canon are only just stoner metal records at all.
Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @JosephOEarp.