And yea, there was the riff, and there was 9 minutes and 50 seconds of it. That above is ‘The Clarity’, the new single from Californian stoner behemoths Sleep – their first new release since Dopesmoker, their single-track album released in 2003 – and has been put out as a free download through Adult Swim’s Singles series. The band reunited in 2009 for live outings, and have, it seems, recently been sketching out some new material. In an interview with NPR last week, the band said: "Sleep has been sporadically writing riffs for a while now. When Adult Swim approached Sleep about a single, Sleep set aside those riffs and wrote the single in a couple days. ‘The Clarity’ is an exercise in musical stream of thought, as all proper music should be."
While you probably shouldn’t hold your breath for further new material – the band rightly didn’t give much away on that front, saying, "It would be impossible to describe any new material from Sleep that does not yet exist […] It would be an amalgamated effort of decades of riff immersion" – they will be playing five shows in the US next month, as Pitchfork point out. Here are the dates:
AUGUST
Sun 24 – House Of Blues, Boston, MA w/ Heavy Blanket
Mon 25 – Stage 48, New York, NY
Tue 26 – Union Transfer, Philadelphia, PA
Fri 29 – Thalia Hall, Chicago, IL
Sat 30 – Pappy & Harriets, Pioneertown, CA
