Dopesmoker, or Jerusalem—A Review

What if you heard a riff so good you didn’t want it to end? What if it never ended?

“…and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”

There is a current, a flow, an undulation that has rolled for all time. Some call it the Tao, some the Holy Spirit. The hermeticists speak of rhythm and vibration as guiding principles of the universe. The undulation is indifferent to Man. Man simply rides upon it like a gull on the Pacific. Naïvely, Man thinks he controls it. Thinks he: he tames it in his vocal chords, the strings of his harp, his power lines. It was here before Man and it will roll long after the last man rots in the dirt, rots into the wind-swept primordial dust from which he was begotten. It takes many apparent forms discernible to the primitive senses of Man, the senses through which he blindly paws at and palpates a reality surrounding him whose true form no living being will ever know. His senses are proxy at best: hallucinations imperfectly induced by waves belonging to a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum that chance to strike the eye, or a select few frequencies of the air vibrating near his ear. The undulation revolves with planets, sending them through the signs of the zodiac, it blows in the wind, it flows in the waves. It is a vibration, it is heat, it is the pendulum swinging in a clock, it is the song of the whale, a beating heart. It is a riff.

The great flow flows through Man. It’s in the beating pulse of his wine-dark blood, the rise and fall of his chest: diastole and systole. It is in dance and song. Just as it is in the migration of birds, it is in the odysseys and pilgrimages of Man. Venture out, return home: diastole, systole.

In 1995, three weed-priests set out on an expedition to channel the great ever-present undulation through a room full of amplifiers, to create Metal’s magnum opus and inscribe it onto vinyl. According to guitarist Matt Pike, it took four years to write the song. But that’s not true. The song was written long before the oceans rolled. In the ether it sat patiently awaiting its prophets. Through ritualistic bong rips, out of sensimillian cloud these marijuanauts brought forth a transcription of the great undulation. Legend has it, they spent the entire studio advance on weed and amplifiers.

The song’s lyrics recount the tale of a caravan of weed-priests crossing a desert to deliver the sacred flower. This is the story of Sleep, delivering occult knowledge of the great undulation through the language of the Riff. Over two month-long sessions, the band channeled the gnostic energy of the universe through custom-built amplifiers that were so loud that no mortal man, not even Matt Pike, could be in the same room as them. The final product is Dopesmoker, or Jerusalem. One song. A 63-minute epic. A guitar—whose sound us laymen would call “distorted” but our ancestors enlightened with the hermetic truths would correctly recognize as containing within it myriad harmonic fluctuations, the Holy Spirit, the Tao, the voice of God—fades in in pulses. Alone in the mix, it plays a single sustained note, introducing itself before it utters the first Riff: the first of its sacred truths. The riff is its own cyclic, churning flow, upon which the fluctuations of tone themselves ride. The bass drum comes in pounding like the heart of the condemned man on the gallows, cymbals crash like North Sea waves on the deck of the doomed ship. The song continues like this, singing out sacred riff after sacred riff. The song becomes all you know because it is everything you do know and have always known. Engulfed in the song you enter a state of Samadhi; you become one with the undulation.

Like all pilgrimages, the song returns home—back to its opening riff. It ends where it begins because it does not truly end. It is cyclical. It is forever. The song itself one great macro-oscillation upon which all of the song’s minor oscillations of riff, pitch, and tone ride. It is the great undulation. It fades in and it fades out, but it is always there. It is always with you. It is the rhythm and the vibrations that tickled your eardrums and shook your bones five thousand years before you were even born.

—T.M.
Jan 13, 2026