Sleep

Perhaps the definitive stoner metal band, legendary Northern Californians Sleep take the sludgy riffage of vintage Black Sabbath to dark, trippy new levels. By slowing the proceedings down to a crawl and cloaking their sound in bongloads of heady stoner mysticism, Sleep created the blueprint for a new-millennial subgenre of the loud/heavy. The band's 1993 classic Sleep's Holy Mountain garnered major-label interest, but a single-track hour-plus album entitled Dopesmoker sent execs running and ultimately led to Sleep's demise. That album and Jerusalem, an altered version of Dope...