On the afternoon of Friday 6 April 2012 the room that mattered was the Black Heart, a bar down Greenland Place, the alley behind the Underworld in Camden, and on the opening day of the first Desertfest London it held Camden Town Lager on the taps, a bar lined with gold and red wristbands, the editor of The Obelisk among them, and the Washington four-piece Stone Axe starting the festival with a set of Free covers that closed on "All Right Now". Across the street the West Virginians of Karma to Burn had the Underworld's main stage that night, and down the block at the Purple Turtle two members of Truckfighters stood in the crowd to watch Greenleaf, whose singer that weekend was their own bassist. Nothing in either room was desert.
One Friday in one London borough had put Washington State, Örebro, Borlänge and Morgantown on a single ticket, and that is the shape of the object we kept open beside this page: a road atlas with the festival towns circled in marker, Camden, Tilburg, where Roadburn has made the 013 hall its home since 2005, the German field of Freak Valley, which has pressed live albums out of Conan and Monkey3, Clisson, Las Vegas and Stockholm, each ring pressed so hard that it bleeds through onto the next map, so that no page of the genre turns without the weight of the last one showing through. A scene is not a sound. It is an address, and a band is filed under the one it keeps driving home to. The definition of the music belongs to chapter three; this is the directory, with a date and a record against every name.
A scene is not a sound. It is an address, and a band is filed under the one it keeps driving home to.
The Californian desert, where the first circles were drawn
Formed in La Quinta in 1986 by the guitarist Gary Arce, the cousins Mario and Larry Lalli and the drummer Alfredo Hernández, the quartet that played the first generator parties on the empty edges of the Coachella Valley, Yawning Man, released no studio album for nineteen years, so the younger musicians who had stood in front of those generators reached the shops first. Kyuss, formed in Palm Desert in 1987, recorded four albums between September 1991 and July 1995, with Josh Homme running his guitar through bass amplifiers until every riff arrived with the weight of a bass. Fu Manchu took its name in 1990 out of an Orange County hardcore band called Virulence; Brant Bjork, the Kyuss drummer, has made more than a dozen albums under his own name since 1999; and Nebula was built in 1997 by two musicians on their way out of Fu Manchu.
| Band | Home | Formed | Record to start with |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yawning Man | La Quinta, California | 1986 | Rock Formations (2005) |
| Kyuss | Palm Desert, California | 1987 | Blues for the Red Sun (Dali, 1992) |
| Fu Manchu | Orange County, California | 1990 | No One Rides for Free (Bong Load, 1994) |
| Brant Bjork | Coachella Valley, California | solo from 1999 | Jalamanta (1999) |
| Nebula | California | 1997 | To the Center (Sub Pop, 1999) |
New Jersey, West Virginia and the Bay Area
Founded in Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1989 by Dave Wyndorf, its only constant member through eleven studio albums, Monster Magnet released Spine of God in 1991, a year before Blues for the Red Sun, which is enough to stop anyone writing the East Coast into this story as a late copy of the desert. Clutch, formed in Germantown, Maryland, in 1991, is filed as stoner rock and as plain rock rather than as metal, and we mark it at the edge of the map rather than inside it.
The Morgantown band answered Roadrunner with Wild, Wonderful Purgatory in 1999 and Almost Heathen in 2001, both instrumental, split in 2002 and reformed on 23 February 2009 with the same line-up. On the other coast, the San Jose trio Sleep, formed in 1990, recorded Sleep's Holy Mountain with the producer Billy Anderson, and Earache, which had received the tapes as a demo, released them unchanged in Britain in November 1992, and Acid King, formed in San Francisco in 1993 by the guitarist and singer Lori S., saw Busse Woods released by Man's Ruin in 1999; both records are argued over in the Stoner Metal Albums That Set the Sound.
Britain, from Rise Above to the Roundhouse
Born in London in 1995 under the name Our Haunted Kingdom, the quartet that became Orange Goblin shared its first seven-inch with Electric Wizard on Rise Above Records in 1996, released Frequencies from Planet Ten in 1997 and its tenth and last studio album, Science, Not Fiction, in July 2024, and brought the thirty-year campaign to a close with a last show in Kentish Town on 17 December 2025. The Dorset band on the other side of that single appears here only as a crossover, filed as doom first and standing on the leaden side of the border with Dopethrone in 2000. The British power trio Gorilla shared a split LP with Grifter on HeviSike Records on 15 April 2016. Green Lung, a band whose guitarist, drummer and first bassist decided to form it over a few ales in the Black Heart during Desertfest 2016, was named in September 2025 as the headliner of Desertfest London 2026 at the Roundhouse, 15 to 17 May, so the circle around Camden has now been drawn twice.
Scandinavia: Halmstad, Borlänge and Örebro
Formed in Halmstad by Michael Amott after he left Carcass, Spiritual Beggars released its debut album in 1994 and Another Way to Shine in 1996. From Borlänge came Dozer, formed in 1995, whose Supersoul ten-inch Man's Ruin pressed in May 2000 in 1,500 copies on green vinyl, the year of the album In the Tail of a Comet. Greenleaf began in late 1999 as a side project around Dozer's guitarist Tommi Holappa, which is how a bassist from Örebro came to be singing for it in Camden. Graveyard, formed in Gothenburg in 2006, is filed as hard rock and occult rock, and it stays off this page.
Formed in Örebro in 2001 by the bassist and singer Oskar "Ozo" Cedermalm and the guitarist Niklas "Dango" Källgren, the pair that has run the band ever since, Truckfighters spent four years on EPs and a split before recording their first album at Bombshelter Studios between December 2004 and January 2005, producing it themselves and releasing Gravity X on 12 July 2005 through their own label, Fuzzorama Records, with MeteorCity handling it in America. The record runs sixty-seven minutes, opening on the seven and a half minutes of "Desert Cruiser" and closing on "Altered State". The press was polite rather than loud: three and a half stars at AllMusic, 6.5 out of 10 at Blabbermouth.
Then came the road. More than three hundred shows, most of them in Europe, a first American tour in July 2011, and in December of that year a documentary, Truckfighters, with Josh Homme among the interviewees. V followed on 30 September 2016; on 21 February 2018 the band announced a long hiatus, and on 28 August 2019 they were back at Psycho Las Vegas, before a tour on which they played Gravity X from the last track to the first. Behind the two founders the drum stool has changed occupants more than a dozen times, a band run like a haulage firm that keeps the truck and hires a new driver for every run while the fuzz bass stays at the wheel. Since 2019 they have held their own Fuzzfest at Debaser in Stockholm, and on 10 April 2026 Fuzzorama released Masterflow, their sixth album, nine songs in forty-one minutes, ten years after V. In The Obelisk's reading, the band has produced some of the finest heavy fuzz rock of the last twenty years and more. Las Vegas and Stockholm are circled on the atlas by this band alone.
Mainland Europe, the East and the far side of the map
Founded in Munich in 1994 by the guitarist and singer Stefan Koglek, Colour Haze is one of the oldest German stoner bands and has released its records since 2003 on Elektrohasch, the label Koglek runs himself, whose catalogue opens with Los Sounds de Krauts; in September 2022 he announced that it would stop taking other bands and carry on for Colour Haze alone. Monkey3 began as a jam community in Lausanne in 2001 and has never taken on a singer; Mars Red Sky formed in Bordeaux in 2007; and 1000mods, from the Greek village of Chiliomodi, recorded its debut in October 2010 with Billy Anderson, the producer of Sleep's Holy Mountain. Further east, Stoned Jesus formed in Kyiv in 2009, and the Polish band Dopelord belongs to stoner doom and is entered only as a pointer. The circles do not stop at the sea.
| Band | Home | Formed | Record to start with |
|---|---|---|---|
| Colour Haze | Munich, Germany | 1994 | Los Sounds de Krauts (2003) |
| Monkey3 | Lausanne, Switzerland | 2001 | Beyond the Black Sky (Stickman, 2011) |
| Mars Red Sky | Bordeaux, France | 2007 | Mars Red Sky (2011) |
| 1000mods | Chiliomodi, Greece | 2006 | Super Van Vacation (Kozmik Artifactz, 2011) |
| Stoned Jesus | Kyiv, Ukraine | 2009 | Seven Thunders Roar (2012) |
| Dopelord | Warsaw, Poland | 2010 | Songs for Satan (Blues Funeral, 2023) |
| Los Natas | Martínez, Argentina | 1993 | Delmar (Man's Ruin, 1998) |
| Tumbleweed | Wollongong, Australia | 1990 | Galactaphonic (Polydor, 1995) |
| Mammoth Mammoth | Melbourne, Australia | 2006 | Volume IV: Hammered Again (Napalm, 2015) |
The Kyiv band founded by Igor Sydorenko played Hellfest in Clisson in 2016 and in January 2017 became the first Ukrainian rock band to tour South America, carrying the riff to a continent that had been sending it north for more than two decades. Formed in Martínez in 1993, Los Natas first put Delmar out on cassette in 1996 and saw Man's Ruin release it on 10 July 1998.
In Australia, Tumbleweed, formed in Wollongong in 1990 and described by the musicologist Ian McFarlane in his Encyclopedia of Australian Rock and Pop as the "ultimate stoner's band for the 1990s", took Galactaphonic to number six on the ARIA chart in 1995, while Mammoth Mammoth, formed in Melbourne in 2006, signed to Napalm Records after the European sales of its third album. The atlas ends there, not because the roads do, but because the circles thin out. The bands that carry the most weight across all these pages are set out one by one in the Stoner Metal Bands.
