The Sciences

This is the fourth album by the band from San Jose, released by Third Man Records on 20 April 2018 with almost no warning. It is their first full-length since Dopesmoker in 2003 and the last with both Matt Pike and Jason Roeder on it. Sleep re-formed in 2009 and played a handful of shows. When "The Clarity", their first new studio material since 2003, appeared in 2014, the band told NPR Music that they had been writing riffs sporadically for a while, that there was no preconceived idea of what the new material should be, and that it would be an amalgamated effort of decades of riff immersion. In 2017 they posted a message in morse code on their website to say a new album was nearly finished, and it came out during a break in a North American tour on the twentieth of April. The music stands on Al Cisneros's distorted, down-tuned, slow bass alongside Matt Pike's guitar in the same register. Riffs and passages repeat to build a hypnotic state, and Cisneros sings over them as meditatively as he does in Om. Much of the writing is about marijuana and cannabinoids, delivered in a reverential tone. A month after the album, the non-album song "Leagues Beneath" went out through Adult Swim's weekly singles series.