Hi, everyone! Northany Southtano here, the internet's busiest music nerd, and it's time for a review of this new Sleep album, Hempispheres.

Newest record from legendary, game-changing stoner metal outfit Sleep. Their second album on Third Man Records, and their second album since their momentous return in 2018 with the album The Sciences, which, on the metal front, is probably one of the better comeback records of the 2010s.

And [it] arrived after 15 years of studio album silence, with Sleep's last record having been Dopesmoker, or at least their last album for a very long time, and it was quite the statement to leave things off on initially. A single, 63-minute-long monolithic riff-fest, with primal drums and droning guitars, that would go on to set the standard for heavy music in the underground for pretty much the rest of the decade.

Now, just because we had no Sleep in the wake of that album does not mean that we had no music from the band's core members. Matt Pike famously went on to release album after album while spearheading the stoner and sludge metal outfit High on Fire. Al Cisneros, among other bands, sunk a lot of his focus into Om, which operated in similar fields genre-wise, but by comparison had a much more meditative approach, subtler by comparison.

And when Sleep eventually did drop that comeback album, a very serviceable, and I would say enjoyable, comeback album, it was pretty clear their creative dynamics had shifted since the days of Dope Smoker, with a lot of tracks on this thing feeling somewhat akin to some later-era work from Om. Or at least, this album felt much more similar to that than the throttling and much more aggressive performances High on Fire were known for. But still, I ended up getting I ended up getting I ended up getting a lot a lot out of this album, even though I've been much more of a fan of Matt's post-Sleep work than Al's.

And if initial reception is anything to go by, it seems like most fans felt the same, in terms of this record meeting or even exceeding expectations given how long it had been in the making. But as solid as this album was, after a while the silence around a follow-up started to become deafening. But it was like a fifteen-year gap between this one and its predecessors, so maybe expecting another record in just several years is wishful thinking.

Then the pandemic happened, and not too long after it became clear that band dynamics might be blocking sleep progress once again, because I think longtime drummer Jason Roeder parted ways with the band in 2024. And then, as recently as this year, Matt Pike suddenly peaced out as well. And they were both very quickly replaced.

We had Dale Crover of Melvins fame on drums now, and now Bubba Dupree on guitar, who definitely has experience for sure, but does not bring the sort of resume that you would expect from a guitarist who is essentially playing a vital role in the most influential and significant stoner metal act in the modern era. So now Al is the only real original member of the band, which is not an impossible framework to build off of. But even with Bubba's and Dale's respective talents there backing him up, Hempispheres still sounds like we are setting sail with a skeleton crew, and barely holding it together along the way.

Because I feel like with Sleep and most stoner metal bands, honestly, a key to the appeal is whether or not the music is generating a sound that's immense, awe-inspiring, and easy to kind of get lost in. And from the jump, the aesthetics and the production are dry. Dry like you're choking on a mouthful of powdered cinnamon dry. The bass is really thin and clunky. The guitars also, a lot of the time, have no depth, no guts, no buzz, no real body to speak of. And then the drums are a little too pristine, or rather, feel a little out of whack with respect to the vocals and the guitars and the bass.

I mean, there are songs where not only are they the loudest thing in the mix, but literally, these quarter-note hits on the bell of either the crash or the ride cymbal are the loudest thing being piped right into my fucking ear. Which, in what world does a Sleep album need to have that as the sonic focal point of the mix? If anything, the drum should be at an equal level with everything else, or put a little in the background to be blended in with the walls of guitar. Because it's kind of that drone-y quality of the guitar and bass that makes the music so easy to get lost in.

But yeah, generally speaking, I wouldn't say the mix on this is terrible, but it's terrible for a Sleep album. Then, in addition to that, you, of course, have AL's trademark clean, flat, almost monotone lead vocal, which on many an Om album, despite my best efforts, I just cannot get into all that much. But it feels especially passionless here.

The title track, for example, kind of feels like I'm listening to a stoner metal book on tape. And given that AL is, of course, at the helm of this thing, we are also getting some more synthesizers in the mix here and there, which I could see being more of a game-changer or a factor if they were leaned into. But at most, they are just kind of merely a side dish to the guitar riffs and drums.

Surprisingly, there's a touch of vibraphone, or what sounds like vibraphone, at the very end of the album. But all of this extra bit of window dressing is not enough to take away from the fact that I just don't think that, in such a short period of time, the band chemistry is really there to make these jams and make these extended 11-minute-long pieces worthwhile. Because not only are the riffs just so supremely bland, but the experience of hearing these guys perform them is just so tedious.

And you can really hear that it is not there on "Arrival of the Industry Ships" when the band really tries to pick up the momentum, get a little bit louder, kind of lean into those grooves a little bit more. But when they try to push it, they just don't sound that tight and together. Plus, the bass sounds really funny in the final third of the track. There's kind of this weird grating, scraping sound to it, digging into the neck or the pickup or something. I don't know if it's like a pedal setting or if it's just how it was EQ'd. But it sounds terrible. This does not feel like a proper studio album from Sleep. At best, this comes across like something I would hear sound quality-wise from a live bootleg, direct-to-board recording, or something.

I mean, look, if you've heard and enjoyed Sleep's past work, or even The Sciences, I'm not gonna say that quality-wise this record is so far away from the original Sleep vision or where you might want a Sleep album to land, that it's like the worst album I've heard in my life or one of the worst records I've heard of this year. It's certainly not that down in the dumps. But Hempispheres is far enough from the mark that I can handily say this is one of the most disappointing albums I've heard this year.

Because again, the jams, the production, the riff writing, the vocals are just really not there. And if those baseline boxes are not being checked on a Sleep album, then what else do you have? Which is why I'm feeling about a strong three on this one.

Anthony Fantano. Sleep. Forever.