Perhaps the definitive stoner metal band, legendary Northern Californians Sleep took 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 Dopesmoker, eventually saw the light of day, but Sleep had long since passed, its members splitting into the acclaimed acts Om and High on Fire. ~ TiVo Staff