What's Going on With Stoner Rock?

Since its inception in the early 1990's, stoner rock and stoner metal have seen many bands come and go, and have been interpreted and worked into many styles. However in the last decade or so a trend of increasing technicality and prog influence has emerged in many of the most notable stoner acts. I'm taking a look at when this started, where its roots in the genre lay, and what it reflects on the genres outlook.

And at the end I've made a list of the go-to records to get started on the genre, skip there.

Elder live @ The EARL, Atlanta, GA, 2023

What Does 'Progressive Stoner' Even Mean?

Saving a more full exploration into the artists of the microgenre for later, progressive stoner rock, stoner-prog, tech-stoner, or any other such name defines a subset of 21st-century stoner bands who have incorporated large elements of progressive rock, space rock, and post-metal into their sound.

Now, anyone familiar with stoner rock/metal may immediately recognize that both genres already originated from a mix of psych rock and metal, anyway. What use is it to reiterate that? What distinguishes stoner prog in this way is that it represents a full evolution of stoner metal's core sound. The very basis of the song structure and riffing is altered, and the way that the songs come together necessarily changes alongside.

Stoner prog is recognizable for its extended, but structured song lengths, tight and complex drumming, contrasting guitar tones, and an incorporation of abnormal song structures and time signatures. While stoner metal has always had long songs, there is an important distinction between Electric Wizard and Elder. That being that the Wizard's songs are built around a droning repetition of its riffs with drowning fuzz and distortion. Whereas Elder instead incorporates literal dozens* of distinct riffs into their songs, with whip-lash transitions between them, and with a mix of both bombastic fuzz and clearer guitar tones.

Note that this is genuinely not an exaggeration, by my count Elder's "Lore" has a minimum of 14 distinct riffs across its 16 minute runtime.

However, in a bit of a tangent, it is also notable that the influence of prog in the genre extends beyond bands like King Buffalo or Elder, who make this full evolution. For some groups, it is closer to a simple mish-mash of progressive rock and stoner rock. Take the example of Samsara Blues Experiment, who for the majority of their career played a similar jammy style of psychedelic stoner rock as Earthless, with long and drawn-out song structures. However, on their final release- End of Forever- in 2022, the band incorporated a prominent progressive rock influence, their songs were less jam-inspired, featured more technical performances, and played with their structure more.

Or similarly consider All Them Witches, whose signature bluesy style was largely absent on 2020's Nothing As the Ideal, moving towards a more prog-inflected sound calling to mind the articulate side of Tool.

Or take Stoned Jesus who started the 2010's as a stoner-doom band but beginning with 2018's Pilgrims turned around and started releasing material calling to mind the flowing art rock of The Pineapple Thief and Porcupine Tree.

I would hesitate to consider these artists as part of this microgenre, but they still demonstrate an interesting direction the stoner rock/metal scene has gone in. Prog influence is just about everywhere in the genre now, from all the artists I've mentioned thus far and even in older, returning bands. For instance, when Mammoth Volume and Dozer (two Swedish stoner metal bands similar in sound to Kyuss) returned in 2022 and 2023, respectively, to put out their first new albums in 15 years or more, they both came back with a curious prog-tilt. Hell, when Australian psych-rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard made their first full foray into stoner metal on 2023's PetroDragonic Apocalypse, they did so while incorporating prominent influence from progressive metal bands like Mastodon and Tool.

Example Songs:

"Loam" - King Buffalo
"Lore" - Elder
"Machine" - Naxatras
"Massive Passive" - Samsara Blues Experiment
"The Kuleshov Effect" - Mammoth Volume

Where Did This Start?

Now, I don't know that there is one band, one moment, one album that kickstarted this change. Given the close proximity of psychedelic rock and progressive rock, there was always a small element of prog within stoner rock/metal. Matt Pike described his work with seminal stoner metal acts Sleep and High on Fire as 'progressive metal' after all, and Monster Magnet never were afraid of the haughty storytelling of '70s rock.

*See my article on the history of stoner metal if you'd like to see a more in-depth dive into the genre's origins: link here

But if I had to put my money somewhere, it's on Elder all the way. Their 2009 self-titled sounds a bit like a Sleep cover act, but very quickly, they built their own identity. A style built on off-kilter riffs, spacious atmospheres, and songs that, while long, didn't dwell on individual ideas for long periods like in a lot of doom metal-related music.

Dead Roots Stirring, released in 2011, is arguably the very beginning of the stoner prog sound. Vestiges of it could be heard in the long-form jams and classic-rock flavour of Earthless and Samsara Blues Experiment, but Elder took such a sound and transformed the vague mix of psychedelia, spacey atmospheres, proficient instrumentation, and desert riffs into something with far more urgency. And Elder would only get more progressive over time: 2015's Lore is a masterclass in working progressive songwriting and technicality into natural and emotive music, completely surpassing prog's common insincerity pitfall. 2017's Reflections of a Floating World continues with Lore's sound with epic and anthemic tracks. Before Omens (2020), Eldovar: A Story of Darkness and Light (2021), and Innate Passage (2022) would see the band diminish their stoner metal elements and move towards more straightforward prog rock.

Additionally, there is one band in particular who are the perfect microcosm for the growing scene and trend identified. This band being the previously mentioned Mammoth Volume, a 1990s metallic stoner rock band a-la Kyuss or Lowrider. They released a few records from 1999 to 2002, like highlights Mammoth Volume (1999) and A Single Book of Songs (2001). They were pretty solid and were noticeably sharper and technical than, say, the Kyuss-spinoffs Slo Burn, Hermano, or Unida from the same era. However, when the band reformed in the 2020s, the sound they would espouse on The Cursed Who Perform the Lavagod Rites (2022) would be with a tendency towards ambitious songwriting, usage of acoustic instrumentation, and a clear influence from the likes of Yes, Genesis, and even contemporaries like Motorpsycho. The band piles more evidence of both a growing scene in the last decade, and shows how it hasn't only affected new bands.

What Does This Mean for Stoner Rock?

Slift, Stoned Jesus, Mammoth Volume, and to a lesser extent, Colour Haze, All Them Witches, Dozer, and My Sleeping Karma are all bands who've grown ever more progressive as time goes on, and sometimes in dramatic shifts like with Stoned Jesus. This, along with all the bands "born into" the genre, like Elder, King Buffalo, Sergeant Thunderhoof, Humanotone, and Eye of Doom, who have also gradually leaned more and more into that prog influence. You even have a group like Naxatras who entirely abandoned their remaining stoner rock influence on 2022's IV.

If I'm going to read the crystal ball and predict where the genre is going, here goes: I expect that we'll continue to see bands like My Sleeping Karma and Colour Haze approach but never cross the line of progressive rock. I expect bands like King Buffalo and Elder to continue downplaying their metal elements to double down on their prog elements. I also expect to see more bands like Eye of Doom and Humanotone take the stoner prog sound established in Elder's middle career and keep it running in a more metallic direction. I also anticipate that stoner-doom bands like Spaceslug, Dopelord, and REZN will gradually adopt more of these progressive elements.

But I admit another possibility is that— much like the prog metal-meets-sludge metal style of Mastodon, Baroness, Intronaut, Dvne, and Lord Dying— this microgenre simply won't expand farther than a few major stoner rock artists and some stretches to relative unknowns. Maybe in five or ten years, this seed of a genre will have remained buried. Or maybe I haven't looked hard enough and there is a secret cabal of underground sludge bands following in Mastodon's footsteps, I really don't know.

Essential Albums

Alright, now that we're all experts on this genre/scene/microgenre, here is a smattering of the very best records. There are many more fringe examples, but these are most of what I would call the genre's best offerings.