Sleep Return with a New Lineup, a New Album, a Tour and an Insane Comic Book
I had my ticket. Sleep were finally returning to Australia, and I was going to stand before the amplifiers and follow the smoke towards the riff-filled land in person. Then the tour disappeared. I have long remembered it as the Australian cancellation of 2019, although the actual chronology is slightly different: the concerts were scheduled for January 2018 and cancelled in December 2017 after allegations were made against the tour promoter. Sleep later announced their open-ended hiatus at the end of 2019, which is probably why those dates have fused in my memory. Either way, the result was the same. I had been ready to see Al Cisneros, Matt Pike and Jason Roeder together, and it never happened.
Now Sleep have emerged again, carrying a spacesuit, a new song, a completed album, a North American tour and their first comic book. The returning band consists of Al on bass and vocals, Void guitarist Bubba Dupree and Melvins drummer Dale Crover. “Have Spacesuit Will Travel” is their first released recording since The Sciences in 2018 and their first without Matt Pike. The announcement indicates that this trio has already made an album, although its title, track listing and release date remain undisclosed. The tour begins in San Diego on 8 September and ends in Washington, DC, on 17 November.
There is no pretending that Pike’s absence is a small alteration. Matt’s guitar was one of Sleep’s elemental forces. Al supplied the meditative pulse, spiritual language and immense bass architecture; Matt supplied the volcanic movement within it. Their tension created something nobody else could quite reproduce. The press statement offers no explanation, only that the music and art remain alive, Sleep must move forward, and Al wishes Matt well on his “earth-bound maneuvers.” Matt has not publicly offered his own account. In the new photographs, however, Al looks genuinely happy. He also looks faintly like Tim Burton now, which somehow suits the author of a cosmic marijuana comic more perfectly than anyone could have planned.
Alyssa Maucere, Matt’s former wife, posted critical comments beneath Sleep’s announcement, prompting understandable speculation. Those comments remain her account of events, not Matt’s, and should be treated accordingly. He is fully capable of speaking for himself whenever he chooses. Until then, nobody outside the immediate circle knows whether this was an amicable separation, a gradual creative divergence or something harsher.
I take some cautious reassurance from Arik Roper’s presence. Roper has worked across the visual histories of Sleep and High on Fire, and Matt has said that they have known each other since they were about eighteen or nineteen and have remained friends ever since. Arik created the defining desert pilgrimage imagery for Dopesmoker, illustrated multiple High on Fire releases and has returned to work alongside Dave Kloc on the new comic. His involvement proves nothing about the private relationship between Al and Matt, but it makes the idea of a completely scorched-earth separation seem less certain. Creative families can fracture without every relationship inside them collapsing at once.
There is also a painful parallel with Brent Hinds. Brent left Mastodon in March 2025 after twenty-five years, then died in a motorcycle collision five months later. He and Matt had been close friends and collaborators. They had discussed forming a band together, Brent played on Matt’s solo song “Land,” and Matt later joined the Atlanta memorial march celebrating Brent’s life. Seeing Matt now separated from Sleep inevitably recalls another foundational guitarist suddenly standing outside the band he helped define. Brent’s story cannot be mapped directly onto Matt’s, but their friendship gives the resemblance an added sadness.
Still, I love “Have Spacesuit Will Travel.” I expected the missing Pike element to leave an enormous cavity, yet the song has its own momentum. Dupree wisely avoids manufacturing an imitation of Matt’s guitar language. Crover gives the music a sharper, more mobile drive, while Al’s bass and voice immediately identify the vessel as Sleep. The 4:20 flexi edit feels like a transmission from a longer expedition rather than a complete statement, and the announcement describes the finished recordings as recognisably Sleep while possessing greater agility. It is different, but it does not feel embarrassed by being different. A new lineup attempting to counterfeit the old one would have been far less interesting.
My own fascination with Sleep has always extended beyond the records. In 2021 I began The Sleep Podcast with “Beyond the Known,” riffing about the band and imagining an RPG set within what I called the Somniverse. In 2023 I released “The Lore of Sleep,” narrating the birth of that realm through Iommos, the eternal being who riffed existence into form, followed by the sprawling “The Rifftree Is Risen” presentation. These were hours of recordings spent following the implications already embedded in Al’s lyrics: Iommia, the Marijuanaut, the Weedian, the CBDeacon, the pilgrimage, the sacred riff and the vast cosmic theology surrounding them. I was trying to imagine how those fragments might operate as places, histories, characters and playable mythology.
Sleep had already built the foundations of an RPG without formally announcing one. Their songs describe journeys, orders, rites, artefacts, planets and transformed states of being. Arik Roper’s artwork supplied landscapes and travellers. Dave Kloc expanded the machinery, creatures and physical detail. The records behaved like surviving scriptures from a larger creation whose complete history had never been published. I called it the Somniverse then. I increasingly think of it as the Iommiverse.
Now Al has finally opened it himself.
The Sleep Comic Book is his authorial debut and the first official narrative journey into this world. Its twenty-four black-and-white pages, wrapped in a full-colour cover, begin the saga of the Marijuanaut aboard the Rosinante and carry the traveller towards Planet Iommia, the Weedian and the deeper reverential practices of the riff-filled lands. Third Man describes its visual tradition through the great Conan, Star Wars and KISS comics of the 1970s. The special edition adds a poster, rolling papers, a signed bookplate and the new song on flexi disc. This is insane. This is so cool.
Dave Kloc’s involvement makes it even better for me. I have his two Leagues Beneath pieces framed, and his densely mechanical, hand-built conception of Sleep’s universe has always felt like the ideal counterpart to Roper’s immense spiritual landscapes. Roper shows the pilgrimage as myth; Kloc shows the equipment required to survive it. Placing them together inside an actual sequential story feels inevitable in retrospect. Third Man previously paired “The Clarity” and “Leagues Beneath” as the Iommic Life double single with new Kloc artwork and etchings, and now the label is giving the visual mythology room to become literature.
I will always want to see Al, Matt and Jason play together. That cancelled Australian ticket still represents an encounter I may never recover. Matt’s contribution to Sleep cannot be diminished by a lineup announcement, and whatever he does next—through High on Fire, his solo work or some unforeseen project—will carry the same singular force. Yet Sleep’s history has already survived record-label warfare, lost albums, breakups, reformations, substitutions, medical crises and long silences. Its continuity has never depended upon remaining untouched.
Al sounds ready to continue. Bubba and Dale have entered the vessel without disguising themselves as the men they replaced. A new album exists. The tour is booked. Dave Kloc and Arik Roper are drawing the world. Al Cisneros is finally writing its story. Third Man has understood that Sleep is music, illustration, myth, comedy, ritual and science fiction occupying the same immense frequency.
I am stoked for whatever comes next. The Iommiverse is finally open, and Third Man has handed us the first map.
