Sleep Explores Cosmic Psychedelia with "Have Spaceship Will Travel"

Heavy Song of the Week is a feature on Heavy Consequence breaking down the top metal, punk, and hard rock tracks you need to hear every Friday. This week, we highlight the new single “Have Spacesuit Will Travel” from Sleep.

There will be those who protest a Sleep devoid of both founding guitarist Matt Pike as well as Jason Roeder, the drummer who gave the group second life in their surprising return in 2018. The new lineup, clearly driven by Al Cisneros now but filled out by Bubba Dupree on guitar and a shock appearance of Dale Crover of the Melvins on drums, rejiggers the group’s iconic sound, dialing down the ferocity of the distortion on the guitar and upping the synth to deliver something closer to an approachable Om track. The desert sojourn sensibility is still present here, something the band mastered on the impeccable Dopesmoker and have been mining ever since, but retuned toward their more recent fixation on space they developed during the second phase of the band’s life.

The band’s return also brings to bear a constant question especially in the highly collaborative world of music of who is allowed to use a name. Ultimately, though we may have feelings about authenticity, we are not the authors of the work and thus we do not get to dictate what is or is not a true incarnation of a project. Beyond that philosophical generality, Sleep have always been chimeric, especially once we saw the shape of the two follow-up projects in High on Fire and Om. Pike took his guitarisms, derived ultimately from equal parts Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, hardcore, and death metal, and pushed them to the extreme with High on Fire, producing a sound that gets called sludge metal only because thunderous epic heavy rock doesn’t quite capture the heft of it. Om, meanwhile, spearheaded by Cisneros, took the more meditative aspects of Sleep and, stripped of gloriously overbearing guitar, was able to sink more meaningfully into the motorik hypnotism of the material.

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But ultimately, both projects retained that necessary psychedelia, the real heart of Sleep. The defining aspect of the band is not the sound of the guitars or the Sabbathian heft of the songs but rather that sense of religious sojourn, marijuana mysticism, and an earnest psychedelia. There is a reason their iconic imagery is of a desert caravan that seems more drawn from the Fremen of Dune than the reality of Bedouin nomadism, an image-symbol reinforced by the classic astronaut, which returns on the cover here. It is meant to evoke the wild spirit captured in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey ; that it started so heavy was merely a way to get there.

Honorable Mentions

Baest – “Stormbringer (Togskinner)”

It’s exciting to see a death metal band incorporate hard rock in a way that doesn’t feel like either getting softer, a cheap play for mainstream attention, or a bastardized attempt at a well-codified genre. Baest here channel the same kind of energy Kvelertak took on especially around the time of Nattesferd , infusing a groovy ’70s rock ethos and a not-insignificant amount of RUSH in both the guitar and the drums into an otherwise fairly direct melodic death metal song. So often, melodic death metal misses the point of both traditional heavy metal and death metal at the same time, losing the ragged edges of great trad metal and the feral gory nature of great death metal. This manages to bridge the gap between its two modes without feeling trite; when those double kicks fire up, I dare you not to make a stankface.

Hoobastank – “How Do You Sleep?”

Believe you me, I’m as surprised as some of you are, especially those of you who read my “Mining Metal” column. But credit where credit is due: Hoobastank transform themselves here on this return track into a melodic hardcore act, the kind you might have heard on a Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtrack back in the day. Someone a little less well-read in punk might call this pop-punk because of the clear hookiness of it, but this is classic skate punk through and through. The vocals are spat with a real snark and venom comparable to Billy Talent, one of the few bands of this style to hit the mainstream and not lose a step, while the guitars have a shocking command of groove and bounce that was not present whatsoever in the band’s best-known radio-friendly material. They took a break and came back with the best single of their careers. Kudos.

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Mork – “Ferdamann”

Something about Dimmu Borgir dropping one of the best records of their career should have signified there was something in the air regarding this wing of cleaner, more accessible black metal. The riffs shown here feel like a mid-paced Immortal, gesturing toward wide plains of ice and the indomitable spirit that sojourns across them, but does so in a triumphant way rather than the genre’s more depressive or animalistic wing. There is, of course, still something wolf-like to the material (would it be black metal without it?) but the structure and delivery sits closer to the epic hard rock of bands like Led Zeppelin. The quality of “Ferdamann” however is not contingent on its accessibility; rather, that its achieves accessibility by executing itself so well, which should always be the point.

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_Originally reported by [Consequence](https://consequence.net/2026/06/heavy-song-of-the-week-sleep-have-spaceship-will-travel/)._