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The 40 Greatest Stoner Albums

From Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead to Massive Attack and the Flaming Lips

Our fully-baked picks for the 40 best stoner albums ever range from 1970s black-light warhorses to keyboard-drenched, slow-toke faves from the 2000s, with enough variety to soundtrack any kind of weed buzz. Our criteria? We wanted albums that were especially great for blazing along with, but also just plain great, period — meaning they also had to sound awesome when you’re not high as a giraffe.

This list was originally published June 2013.

2

Portishead, ‘Dummy’

This noirish 1994 LP sounds especially good around 4:20 because few producers have paid such obsessive attention to detail as Portishead‘s Geoff Barrow. Vocalist Beth Gibbons’ cold-water siren songs could induce melancholic inner gazing all by themselves. Barrow, meanwhile, worries over every beat and sample till they reach maximum bloom, transforming the songs into set pieces from a spy movie (“Sour Times”) or near-burying them in hip-hop dub (“Wandering Star”), and always leaving you craving more.

1

Jimi Hendrix, ‘Axis: Bold as Love’

Hendrix‘s second album is Sixties rock’s finest psychedelic odyssey, a bowl-sparking masterpiece whose 13 songs are a virtual banquet of stoner delights: the trippy sound collage from a fake radio station that opens the album, woozy studio tomfoolery, epic dragonfly flights like “Spanish Castle Magic” and “If 6 Was 9,” freak-power Google News-alerts (“white collar conservative flashing down the street pointing their plastic finger at me”) and, of course, guitar playing that pretty much perfected the idea of rock & roll as interstellar escape pod.