The 40 Greatest Stoner Albums

Irony alert: the record about Jeff Tweedy’s post-rehab coolout period is by far Wilco‘s weediest. Elegant and mellow, rich with sweet Seventies rock scholarship, Sky Blue Sky has the best band interplay of any of their albums. On “Impossible Germany” Tweedy and avant-guitar bigshot Nels Cline noodle heavenward like a chill post-rock Steely Dan for six insanely pretty minutes, and the lyrics wrestle rough, fuzzy wisdom from everyday shit like doing the laundry and walking alone around your neighborhood, singing to yourself.

Os Mutantes were kids when they made this debut: Sergio Dias Baptista was only 17, his brother Arnaldo was 20 and singer Rita Lee just 21. But their irreverent blend of Brazilian pop and Anglo-American rock (like that of their cohorts Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso) made for a wild, idea-packed ride where the tunes (“Panis et Circencis,” “Baby”) come as fast as the sonic surprises. It’s one of the late-Sixties’ most mischievous head trips, which is saying something.

The Baltimore duo’s second album was the perfect deep-toking soundtrack for late-’00s indie kids: a drifty, velveteen set full of homemade charm, gauzy keyboards and hypnotic tunes. When Victoria Legrand repeats her “Oh, oh, oh” refrain on “Gila,” it echoes around the brain, just right for times when everything else does too.

Like a super-stoned campfire jam with an A-list of Cali hippie-rockers – including Joni Mitchell and most of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and CSNY – this hazy solo project by the altered-consciousness overachiever sounds like it was pretty much made up on the spot. See the toasted strum-fest “Music Is Love” (with Neil Young on congas!) and “Tamalpais High,” with Jerry Garcia and Jorma Kaukonen noodling around wordless Crosby-Nash harmonies. By the time it’s over, you may not remember your name, either.

Conjuring guitar mass at the Church of Our Lady of Green Bud, this thickly bearded debut opens with what sounds like a wake-and-bake congregation harmonizing about a “red squirrel in the morning” and going on to sing of hummingbirds, meadowlarks and laughing children amid a swirl of strumming, flute-blowing and tambourine jiggling. Sublimely chill, the set flows like a brook; it can turn any inner-city weed-smoking party into a camping trip of the mind.

Turn off your mind, relax and float . . . off? Up? Out? On their breakthrough album, these Icelanders kicked up sound clouds that seem to stretch across the sky, laced with Jónsi Þór Birgisson’s droning, bowed guitar, icy falsetto and melodies so spacey they barely register as tunes. Ágætis byrjun is seriously drifty stuff, ideal for laying perfectly still, going totally blank and imagining every particle in your body gently separating from every other particle.

If Dr. Dre’s Cali-weed dream sometimes feels like a paranoid-gangsta nightmare, this Bay Area crew’s debut (also from ’92) offers a breezier, jazzier and all-around stonier alternative. From the bona-fide hit (“Passin’ Me By,” a West Coast take on De La Soul’s funky Daisy-Age weirdness that’s all-time great) to the tokers’ anthem “Pass the Pipe,” it’s a ride you’ll be psyched to take.

Plenty of classic reggae albums came in instrumental dub versions, remixed for maximum hypnagogic effect. But this Lee Perry-produced classic by vocal duo Cedric Myton and Roydel Johnson is one of the peaks of Jamaican roots music in large part because it came pre-baked. The mesmerizing grooves and transporting tunes of “Fisherman” and “Congoman Chant” are layered with studio muck that grabs and holds whether you’re feeling irie or not.

Jazz keyboardist Herbie Hancock began the Seventies by cutting a heady trio of electronics-laden albums, backed by a volatile sextet. For Head Hunters, he eased up on the mood and made an ultra-groovy funk odyssey that kicked off with a burbling, riffy 15-minute jam perfect for some heavy-lidded wiggling. The album went on to sell a half-million copies, which is an awful lot of black-light soirées.

Recorded from 1967 to 1974 – well over a decade before the master of Nigerian juju was being billed as “the next Bob Marley” – these lush, iridescent workouts are simply some of the sticky-ickiest jams ever recorded anywhere on earth, in any genre. King Sunny’s guitar rolls resplendently over a plush, constantly shifting undergroove on tracks that keep unveiling “whoa, dude” mysteries, even as they languidly bliss out for as long as 18 minutes. It can evoke everything from surf rock to the Grateful Dead, but comparisons only get you so far – he’s gliding through his own stratosphere, high on his own supply.

Two decades into their career, the Flaming Lips sounded like they were discovering the world for the first time – or like they had just smoked some really good Sour Diesel. Amid bright orchestration, spacy electronic excursions, and even some animal sounds, Wayne Coyne sings about a robot-fighting karate expert named Yoshimi, all the while pondering big-picture questions about love, the universe and paranoia. The album’s most famous lyric is familiar to anyone who’s been on a burn-turn gone dark: “Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?”

These Arizona punk rockers started out as snarling punks, but by the time they recorded their third album, they’d come out of the smoke-billowing neo-hippie closet to expose a serious Grateful Dead side. Up on the Sun is utterly golden, inventing their own strand of desert mysticism on bell-ringing guitar zoneouts like “Maidens Milk” and “Two Rivers.” Singer-guitarist Curt Kirkwood sounds like Jerry Garcia hitting up the skate-park, and his bong was clearly always close at hand as he penned cotton-mouthed poetry like “Up in my head there’s an animal kingdom/I am the king of the animals there.” Extra stoner points for ending the album with a song called “Creator,” about how religion is weird.

Dr. Dre‘s solo smash was named after a particularly potent strain of weed, which was fitting: With its bottomless bass vortices, Snoop Dogg’s just-hit-the-bong flow and a laid-back vibe signaling a new kind of gangsta cool, The Chronic felt like an endless toke on a hot summer afternoon. A generation of stoners found it all but impossible not to smoke up their cars when “Let Me Ride” and “Nuthin But a ‘G’ Thang” came on the radio.

Recorded in August 1969, only hours after Hendrix closed Woodstock with the “Star-Spangled Banner,” this big bang of jazz-rock fusion rarely gets credit for also being a psychedelic watershed. Horns and keyboards float and storm like electric clouds in a monsoon sky, their movements warped by echo, reverb, tape edits and loops. It turned the bebop innovator into a hippie-era superstar, gigging alongside the Grateful Dead at venues like the Fillmore West, while its trippy gatefold LP sleeve was a mandatory dorm room weed-cleaning tool for a generation.

The most famous songs on Outkast‘s third album – the singles “Rosa Parks” and “Skew It on the Bar-B” – are party tracks for passing the dutchie from coast to coast. But they’re just part of what makes Aquemini such a red-eyed blast. Mind-erasing Southern-slacker funk suffuses the whole enterprise, from the water-pipe bubbles in the title track to cruising-the-streets soul of “West Savannah” and “Liberation” to the reggae flourishes on “SpottieOttieDopaliscious.” They never sounded this smartly spaced-out again.

The muzzy sound of four very high young men hanging out in Palm Desert, Cali, just making one of the all-time great stoner metal albums, nbd. Future Queens of the Stone Age leader Josh Homme provides the headache fuzz-tone and swinging grooves, and the CD version of the album provides a clue it’s meant for deep listening, possibly while too baked to move: The 10 tracks are only playable as three “movements.”

This stoned-soul masterpiece unfurls grooves that sneak up on you like kush cookies, with Questlove’s funky one-beats appearing and disappearing like peas in a street-corner hustler’s shell game. Sparkling with red-eyed tape effects, turntable tricks, handclaps and finger-snaps, its weedhead cred is capped on “Left and Right” with a baked MC turn by Redman and Method Man, who sets the standard for stoned-loverman Seventies TV-quoting free association: “Baby you got me like Joanie had Chachi/Until she got high and went and fucked Potsie.”

Underappreciated as vapo-session soundtrackers, MMJ have actually made a few classic 4:20 LPs. But this is the most perfectly-realized. “Gideon” is resplendent with meteor-shower guitars; “Dondante” is a slo-mo joint that explodes your head halfway through. But most surprising are the reggae grooves of “Off the Record” and “Wordless Chorus” – the latter an unlikely dub session filled with Jim James’ ecstatically post-verbal falsetto wailing. Puff enough, and dude’s gorgeous gibberish will sound like the wisdom of the ages.

Is it the ultimate shoegaze album? Absolutely. But also perfect for sitting on the couch, cranking it to 11 and the letting shuddering guitar noise (“Only Shallow”), proto-jungle drum breaks (“Soon”) and enormous waves of fuzz and howl (pretty much all of it) amplify your high. The vocals are just buried enough to both inspire a few rounds of “what did she just say?” and then make you realize you don’t much care.

Protection is where these Bristol, England trip-hop masters refined their singular blend of beat science, soul music and the part of rave culture that happens at 5 a.m. after the dancing is over, when you are trying to calm down. And if you like this (and living in a blue cloud), you’ll love this album’s brilliant spin-offs, like Mad Professor’s remix LP No Protection and Tricky’s Maxinquaye, a.k.a. the best one-night-stand-while-fucked-up album ever.

For more than 40 years, Paranoid has been perfect for a miserable, rainy afternoon – just you and your dragon-shaped bong. One of the greatest heavy metal albums ever made, with one of the oddest covers (a war pig!), it features such lumbering metal classics as “Iron Man,” “War Pigs” and “Fairies Wear Boots,” written while Ozzy Osbourne and Geezer Butler were reportedly high as monkeys. And then there’s the title, that sad side effect of too many such afternoons.

Dub music might be the most accurate-ever musical translation of stoned brainwaves. In the hands of Augustus Pablo, who transformed his signature instrument, the melodica, from kindergarten singalong helper to the sonic equivalent of an indica-packed ice bong, dub reached its most sublime heights. This instrumental set is his chill-out masterpiece, with productions by dub’s two grandmasters, King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry, along with grooves by a Seventies reggae A-team and occasional vocal fragments that surface like half-formed thoughts before slipping away again. Potent.

A few generations have been blown away by this record, from Eighties post-punks to early ’00s Brooklynites, who ripped it off mercilessly. (Phish loved it, too, once covering the whole album live.) The heady mix of quasi-African and Arabic rhythms, New Wave twitchiness and David Byrne’s existential crises (“Once in a Lifetime” is only the most famous) somehow also seem joyous and even blissful. An album designed for both deep contemplation and maximum head-nod.

It was recorded in 1977, but this cornerstone of both hip-hop and EDM still sounds like the future – as imagined by a bunch of well-groomed Germans chilling in an Amsterdam hash bar. “Europe Endless” conjures a procession of chrome-plated cyber-gnomes, “Showroom Dummies” sounds like a wake ‘n’ bake trip to the Berlin’s KaDeWe superstore. But the title track, which informed Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” and a generation of breakdancers, is like sneaking vaporizer one-hits on the Acela train en route to . . . damn yo, what’s our stop again?

Still the gold standard for rap-less hip-hop head trips, Josh Davis assembled this funky, hallucinogenic record entirely from samples of obscure old recordings. The miles-deep result is a locust swarm of tune fragments, odd timbral references, turntable scratches, sound effects,and suggestive spoken word tidbits that build their own fully-furnished universe. But it’s the fat, fusion-flavored drum breaks that carry the day; they’re the head-nodding equivalent of a chronic-powered rollercoaster ride.

This double-LP classic of jammed-out blues and rock is, like any good trip, guided by a spirit of adventure and full of surprises. Many of the best parts come courtesy of the guitar tandem of Duane Allman and Dickey Betts, who are either locked in liquid harmony or taking off on jazzy flights of fancy. When they get seriously cooking on “Whipping Post” and “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” all you can do is shake your head and say, “Siiiiiiiiiick.”

“I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe” utters an ominous voice from what sounds like the bottom of a giant bong floating through outermost space. So begins the title track of the ultimate P-Funk head trip, followed by a soaring, echo-drenched, 10-minute Eddie Hazel solo journey that stands with the headiest electric guitar displays ever recorded. The rest of set is white-knuckled Black Power acid funk that will have you dancing in your head even if you can’t get out of your chair.

Everything about this Brit band’s third album screamed “DRUGS!!!!” – right down to the sleeve made to look like prescription meds. Soaked in layers of horns, piano and strings, mixing up fuzzy guitar roar and orchestral bliss, Space was the apex of leader Jason Pearce’s efforts to blend God (well, “No God Only Religion”) and drugs (“Cop Shoot Cop”) while worshiping one just like the other.

Eno’s 1975 LP is a stunner, as impressionistic as any pop record of the Seventies. Wobbly synths and tiny blippy tunes power more or less proper songs such as “St. Elmo’s Fire” and “I’ll Come Running,” while gorgeous instrumentals such as “The Big Ship” and the title track are zone-out breaks to get lost in. Eno discovered a new psychedelia; rarely has an album title been more appropriate.

“You’ll definitely like our shit more when you’re high,” RZA said a few years ago. “Our shit is high music.” Ya think? On their epochal 1993 debut, weed smoke pretty much rolls out of your speakers as you listen to RZA’s stanky soul samples and cavernous, slow-rolling beats. The Shaolin mythology could only have come from stoned Saturdays hanging out watching kung fu movies, and on “C.R.E.A.M.” Raekwon even offers sound advice on the perfect chemical highball to enhance your buzz: “No question I would speed, from cracks and weed/The combination made my eyes bleed.” Disclaimer: If you actually do this, you might die.