Matt Pike formed High on Fire in the late summer of 1998, roughly six months after Sleep collapsed. London Records had financed what became Dopesmoker, a single-song opus running over an hour, and refused to release it. Sleep disbanded in 1997. The shorter version, Jerusalem, came out in 1998 on Tee Pee Records, posthumously, while the band was already gone. Pike did not take long to find his footing. He recruited drummer Des Kensel and bassist George Rice, played his first show on November 23, 1998 at the Covered Wagon in San Francisco, and began building something that carried everything Sleep had taught him about weight and tone while refusing to be contained by the tempo Sleep had made sacred.
By 2005, High on Fire were three albums deep and about to make the record that would settle the question of what Pike actually was. Blessed Black Wings, released February 1, 2005 on Relapse Records, was recorded and produced by Steve Albini at Electrical Audio in Chicago. The lineup in the room was Pike on guitar and vocals, Des Kensel on drums, and Joe Preston on bass, in what would be Preston's only album with the band before Jeff Matz took over. Albini's production gave each instrument its own air to breathe while keeping the collective mass intact, a significant departure from the muddier low-end of the two previous records. The production clarified everything, which made the whole thing hit harder.
The album opens with "Devilution," which begins in a tribal drum pattern before accelerating into something closer to thrash than anything Sleep ever attempted. That movement, from ceremonial weight to forward-charging velocity, is the argument the entire record makes. Pike had said publicly that when he formed High on Fire, he was thinking of Celtic Frost with black metal in the frame, and "Devilution" makes that lineage audible without ever sounding derivative. Track 2 is "The Face of Oblivion," and the title track does not arrive until track 5, sitting at the center of the record's architecture, its main riff earning a place on Loudwire's 2013 list of the ten best metal riffs of the 2000s. "The Face of Oblivion" and "Cometh Down Hessian" draw from H.P. Lovecraft, from At the Mountains of Madness and The Hound respectively, giving the record a mythological density that Sleep's cannabis cosmology had approached from a different direction. The Lovecraft connection was structural, a way of insisting that the violence on the record was in service of something larger and stranger than aggression for its own sake.
What Blessed Black Wings accomplished was a kind of translation. Sleep's power had always come from bludgeoning repetition and extreme volume, from the conviction that staying in one place long enough could become transcendent. High on Fire took the same tonal palette, the same fuzz-soaked guitar weight, the same commitment to riff as primary architecture, and accelerated it into something that thrash listeners could enter from one side and doom listeners could enter from the other. The record occupied both simultaneously, which is a much harder thing to do. Kensel's drumming was central to this: operating in a shuffle pace that gave Pike's riffage room to be both crushing and mobile. The rhythm section was the hinge the whole translation swung on.
The cultural ripple from that 2005 release was not abstract. The future members of Mastodon met at a High on Fire show in a basement in Atlanta in late 1999, and officially formed the band on January 13, 2000, five years before Blessed Black Wings arrived. The record that opened the door between doom and the broader metal underground came after an entire generation of bands had already been watching Pike work. Blessed Black Wings gave that generation a document to point to. It was voted 48th in Kerrang!'s 50 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century and landed at number 83 on Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time. The vinyl version included a cover of Judas Priest's "Rapid Fire" as a bonus track, which was a deliberate placement. It put the record in a lineage that ran from British heavy metal through American doom through whatever High on Fire had become, a thing that did not have a clean genre name because it was the seam between genres rather than a genre itself.
Pike has always insisted he never wanted to be just a doom band. Blessed Black Wings is the evidence that he meant it, and the proof that knowing where you came from does not have to mean staying there. The Sleep DNA is audible in every riff on that record. It is audible in the tone, in the commitment to weight as a primary value, in the refusal to let speed become an excuse for thinness. The record moves. It charges. It does something with that inherited mass that Sleep never asked it to do, and in doing so it made both bands more legible, Sleep retroactively and High on Fire in real time. The door between those two rooms has been open ever since.
