Losing Matt Pike, no matter who he’d be replaced by, would—in theory—seem to be equivalent to losing a Benjamin and gaining a Lincoln. On the other hand, Matt Pike appears to have lost his fucking marbles at some point over the course of his tenure as one of contemporary metal’s most compelling frontmen and greatest lead guitarists; reading David Icke will do that to a person. But Jon “Bubba” Dupree, of the pioneering 1980s hardcore punk band Void, seamlessly picks up where Pike left off as the guitarist for stoner metalheads Sleep, whose new record, Hempispheres, now saunters onto shelves. For the taint left on him by his interest in bigoted conspiracy theories, Pike remains a master of riffs, licks, and solos, the rare living legend to live up to the honorific; his departure leaves Al Cisneros as Sleep’s designated survivor, the last remaining founding member. It’s fair to wonder what Sleep even is without Pike, and for that matter without Jason Roeder, the band’s drummer from 2010 to 2019, then 2021 to 2024, replaced here by Dale Crover of Melvins. Can Sleep really be Sleep under those circumstances? But then again, if the songs are good, one can reason, it shouldn’t matter who plays guitar and drums. And hey, imagine that: it doesn’t matter much at all, because the songs on Hempispheres are, in fact, good, if cooler than what Sleep diehards might crave by a degree or so. In the interest of fairness, Sleep hasn’t been the same band that pummeled listeners with pressure wave after pressure wave since 2003’s Dopesmoker; each subsequent record has felt a little more laid-back than the last, though nonetheless intense even by non-stoner or doom metal standards. (A player like Pike will have that effect on your sound.) Regardless of lineup, Sleep makes the kind of music that happens to you, not the kind that happens around you. Pike’s absence changes nothing in that regard: Hempispheres requires your full, undivided attention no matter what experience you desire from it, though whether you long for Dopesmoker’s days or know how to embrace change, the record is a cosmic treasure trove. “Cosmic,” of course, connotes any number of wildly different associations: Lovecraft, for instance, or Funkadelic’s fifth album, contemporaneously maligned in 1973, or a handful of Marvel characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the 1960s. Your mileage with Hempispheres’ motifs, expressed through Cisneros’ playful, deadpan lyricism, may vary. Take the record’s title track, on which he details nature regaining ground over urban environs, with “root vines” pushing through the ground to “end concrete’s dominion” and “retake the cities”; the imagery might sound hopeful, even soothing, to one set of ears, but nightmarish and catastrophic to another. Dupree’s palm-muted strumming and sustained notes facilitate the former reading; Crover’s blunt staccato drumming, on the other hand, lends itself to the latter. Cisneros ties these disparate sensations together as Sleep’s foundation–its lead vocalist and bassist, its storyteller and backbone. Not all of Hempispheres embodies that sort of dual-perspective narration; occasionally, the album tells us about a king bummer, like on the strutting “Arrival of the Industry Ships,” in which Cisneros’ singing functions almost as an invocation as a cohort of space barons make planetary landfall. There’s a sense of purpose, or at least deliberateness, to the song’s mechanical rhythm, intended perhaps to match the picture of a “steel column bearing down,” of landing gear digging into the earth as a “ramp falls.” It’s a story of colonial incursion: “Two worlds collide on Iommic ground,” drones Cisnero, “Feign good faith to the Cultivators / Betray the muse of their souls yet smile.” Sleep isn’t leaving room for sunnier interpretations here. If you know your history, then you can guess where this meeting between a native population (the “Cultivators”) and a foreign entity (the “salesman,” referenced earlier on the track) will go. Maybe urbanity’s destruction beneath a crush of vengeful vines is preferable after all. Whether Sleep’s sound on Hempispheres is preferable to that of 2018’s The Sciences or, once again, Dopesmoker, is up to the beholder. But as much as the record differs from the band’s past efforts, it holds far more in common with them even as it carves out a fresh identity via Dupree and Crover. This isn’t Matt Pike’s Sleep, and that’s okay; it’s theirs, and Cisneros’, and just as intergalactically evocative as it’s ever been. [Third Man] Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can find his collected work at “his personal blog.” He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.