For all of the variety within metal and its various subgenres, perhaps no two camps are further apart than doom and thrash. Doom metal is slow and plodding, its tempo held back by the immense mass of its heaviness. Thrash, on the other hand, is brutally fast, like a motorcycle strapped with machine guns.
And at the center of this dichotomy is Matt Pike. After rising to prominence in the legendary stoner doom band Sleep, he formed the thrash project High on Fire. And while there’s still plenty of stoner metal crossover here, the tempo is a good eight times faster than anything Sleep ever did. Snakes for the Divine is a riffy, smokey record that stands up to even the thrashiest of thrash classics.
In the late 1980s, a young group of musicians in Palm Desert, California cut their teeth playing “generator parties.” Small crowds would gather in the desert with gasoline generators and copious amounts of beer and cannabis. And into these sparse, potsmoke filled wastelands, stonerrock pioneers Kyuss would play directly to the crowds, free of the politics of club owners and venue promoters.
I’ve been a huge fan of Massachusetts psych-metal outfit Elder from the moment I heard the opening chords of 2017’s 
Three years ago, I fell in love with Elder’s Reflections of a Floating World, an interplanetary blend of doom metal, psychedelic rock, Krautrock, and prog.
