Sleep handed their label one hour-long song, and the band fell apart
Signed to London Records after a breakthrough second album, the San Jose trio Sleep delivered a follow-up that was one track running over an hour. Executives called it unmarketable, chopped it up with an outside producer, and the standoff broke the group. Five years later the original finally emerged and is now hailed as a classic.
Sleep grew in the early 1990s out of a band called Asbestosdeath, formed by bassist and singer Al Cisneros with drummer Chris Hakius; Matt Pike later joined on guitar. Launched in 1990 as a four-piece, they released Volume One the following year, after which fourth member Justin Marler left to become an Eastern Orthodox monk. Critic Eduardo Rivadavia calls them perhaps the ultimate stoner rock band, and Cisneros is the only member to last throughout.
Their 1992 record Sleep's Holy Mountain, soaked in the sound of Black Sabbath and Blue Cheer, is widely treated as the seminal stoner metal album. It drew a potentially lucrative offer from London Records, and work on the third album started in 1995. When the label had David Sardy remix and divide the colossal piece, the unhappy musicians deadlocked and eventually split, with Pike founding High on Fire and the other two forming Om.
Their abandoned epic surfaced in 1998 as an official bootleg called Jerusalem, and in 2003 Tee Pee Records put out the untouched version as Dopesmoker, generally considered definitive. An excerpt even turns up on the soundtrack of Jim Jarmusch's film Broken Flowers.
Reunion came in 2009 for two sets at All Tomorrow's Parties in Britain, after which Hakius retired to raise a family and Jason Roeder of Neurosis took over. In November 2017 the band hinted at new music through a message in Morse code, then on April 19, 2018 announced The Sciences for release the very next day, their first album in nearly two decades; Spin called it a genuine miracle for fans. In 2026 Pike departed, with Dale Crover of the Melvins and Bubba Dupree joining for a fifth album, Hempispheres.
Source: Sleep (band)
