The Sludge Metal Albums That Made the Style

Nineteen minutes and thirty-nine seconds. That is the running time of the second side of My War, released by Black Flag on SST Records in March 1984, and every record on this page descends from it, a strange inheritance, because the band behind those three songs had built its name on speed and nothing but speed. Side one keeps the promise. Side two breaks it.

Picture a rusted oil drum left at the lip of a drainage ditch behind a truck yard, a seam split along its bottom rim, nobody watching. What comes out is a thin black thread that finds the water and keeps moving, a rainbow sheen widening until it touches both banks and travels on into ditches the man who dumped the drum never saw. That is how sludge metal spread, and it is how it sounds: a riff that does not strike but seeps, a tempo that lets the tar find its own level. No movement was founded. A handful of records leaked into the ground water, and the sheen is still widening.

What follows is the formative canon in order of release, the sludge metal albums that fixed the style's parts one at a time: the crawl, the scream laid over it, the long form, the Louisiana swing, the feedback left running. The definition of the style, from the dirge tempo to the hardcore throat, is set out in the chapter this belongs to. This page is about the order in which the oil reached the water.

Order matters, because nearly every quarrel about sludge is a quarrel about who came first. We begin one step before the beginning, with a band that was never sludge at all and that gave the idea its permission.

The leak, 1984 to 1990

My War keeps its first side fast and hands its second to "Nothing Left Inside", "Three Nights" and "Scream", each past six minutes and each dragged at a tempo that tore up, in front of its own audience, the rules American hardcore had written for itself. Steve Turner of Mudhoney has said it made the Melvins slow down to a crawl almost at once.

The Montesano trio that had begun in 1983 as a fast hardcore band answered with Gluey Porch Treatments in 1987 with the six-minute "Eye Flys" at the front. Ned Raggett of AllMusic hears drawn-out syllables descending into murk, and the band had cut it at Studio D in Sausalito in October 1986 with Mark Deutrom producing. It fixed the crawl.

The New Orleans quintet that Jimmy Bower and Joey LaCaze founded in 1988 and Mike IX Williams came to front, Eyehategod, recorded In the Name of Suffering for about a thousand dollars, and AllMusic hears in it the band's ugliness in its rawest state. It put a hardcore scream on top of the crawl. Who reached the crawl first is argued under what Was the First Sludge Metal Band; what this record proved is that the crawl could take root in Louisiana.

The crawl finds its throat, 1991 to 1993

The Melvins' Bullhead opens on the eight and a half minutes of "Boris", a riff hauled across the floor like a gearbox pulled out of a wreck on a tow chain. Rolling Stone, ranking it sixtieth among metal albums in 2017, credited it with making the Melvins a metal band through longer songs and clearer production.

Born out of the Oakland hardcore scene in 1985, Neurosis stretched "To Crawl Under One's Skin" to nearly eight minutes and the title track of Souls at Zero past nine, and Decibel took the record into its Hall of Fame in August 2016. Sludge learned that it could be long.

The band that brought tonnage where Eyehategod brought squalor, Kirk Windstein's Crowbar, recorded its self-titled second album in New Orleans in 1992 with Phil Anselmo of Pantera producing, and Pavement Music released it in October 1993. Its two videos, "All I Had (I Gave)" and "Existence Is Punishment", went out on MTV and were aired on Beavis and Butt-Head, where the verdict from the sofa was that the music sounded slow and fat. It sold around 100,000 copies without a major label. What Crowbar fixed was weight that could survive television, riffs lowered onto each beat like an engine block let down on a chain hoist, one link at a time, leaden and in no hurry.

Eyehategod made the crawl ugly. Crowbar made it fat enough for MTV and never once sped it up to get there.

A month before Crowbar reached the shops, on 9 September 1993, Century Media had put out Eyehategod's Take as Needed for Pain, recorded at Studio 13 in New Orleans, with "Blank" opening it at seven minutes and "Shoplift" answering at three. Terrorizer placed it first among sludge albums in 2009, and Rolling Stone ranked it ninety-second in 2017. Two readings. One verdict.

Louisiana, Boston and Oakland, 1994 to 1996

From Houma, Louisiana, the quintet around Dax Riggs and Sammy Duet, Acid Bath, put "Scream of the Butterfly" and "Dr. Seuss Is Dead" at the centre of sixty-nine minutes, behind a clown self-portrait by the murderer John Wayne Gacy, and by 1999 When the Kite String Pops had sold more than 37,000 copies in the United States with no publicity at all.

The Boston quartet formed in 1991 by former members of the hardcore band Disrupt, Grief, recorded Come to Grief over five days in August 1994 at the Lanes in Allston, Massachusetts, with Bill T. Miller producing, and Century Media released it later that year. Jeff Hayward told Decibel for its Hall of Fame induction in 2018 that the band took the slow, "caveman" approach of Saint Vitus and added the aggression of its hardcore past, and Decibel's countdown of May 2019 hears sludge played at inhumanly slow speeds, ranking "Earthworm" first as a song that goes on until it becomes punishment. Where New Orleans sweated, Boston froze.

About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The swing came through a side project. Down, with Anselmo singing, Windstein and Pepper Keenan of Corrosion of Conformity on guitars, Todd Strange on bass and Bower on drums, recorded NOLA at Ultrasonic Studios in New Orleans with Crowbar guitarist Matt Thomas producing alongside the band, and "Stone the Crow" reached number 40 on the Mainstream Rock chart.

Recorded in December 1995 in Oakland with Billy Anderson and released by Relapse on 2 April 1996, Through Silver in Blood runs seventy minutes, and on it Neurosis stopped pushing sludge forward and began to break it open from the inside, like a flood siren left wailing over a town the water has already taken. In Rolling Stone, Steve Smith called it a titanic mix of hardcore and sludge metal notions, and Fact placed it first among post-metal albums in 2015. Here the stain crossed into something that would need a new name.

That same spring Century Media released Dopesick, also produced by Billy Anderson and recorded at Side One Studios in New Orleans, opening on "My Name Is God (I Hate You)" and carrying "Dixie Whiskey" in under three minutes. Terrorizer ranked it second among sludge albums in 2009, praising its wave upon merciless wave of feedback. The feedback left running was the last part to be fixed.

Past the ditch, 2002 to 2017

The Atlanta quartet Mastodon recorded Remission with Matt Bayles in October 2001, Relapse released it in May 2002, and Kerrang! later put it on its list of the thirteen most essential sludge records. That September Bayles's name was on another sleeve, when the Boston band Isis put out Oceanic on Ipecac, with the ten minutes of "Weight" at its heart; Terrorizer named it album of 2002 and Rolling Stone ranked it seventy-second in 2017.

Out of Baton Rouge, Thou released Heathen, with "Free Will" at fourteen and a half minutes, and Pitchfork named it the best metal album of 2014. The Denver trio Primitive Man followed with Caustic on Relapse on 6 October 2017, recorded that April and May with Dave Otero at Flatline Audio in Denver, and Ethan McCarthy told Decibel on 7 September 2017 that the band had tried to be heavier than everything it had done before. Nothing on that record would have been possible without nineteen minutes on the second side of My War.

The stain also ran sideways, into Seattle, where bands named Black Flag and the Melvins among their teachers, and the argument over is Alice in Chains Sludge Metal is really an argument over how far the sheen travelled before it stopped being the same oil. The records above are the drum itself.

Sources and notes

• Decibel: Grief's "Come to Grief" Inducted into the Decibel Hall of Fame
• Decibel: Track Premiere & Interview: Primitive Man, "Commerce"
• Encyclopaedia Metallum: Eyehategod, Take as Needed for Pain
• Bandcamp: Primitive Man, Caustic
• Discogs: Down, NOLA
• Wikipedia: My War