EARTH

For nearly 30 years, Earth's , its lone constant member, has inhabited a uniquely elastic role in rock. From the very beginning, Earth has been both an exponent of experimental drone-based guitar music and a signature practitioner of the detuned riff inspired by ’s . They remain a singular entity, even though bands such as and credit Earth's influence as inseparable from their existences. The only constant in this band's aesthetic is change, an odd point of irony given that their recorded music relies on heavy yet hypnotic forms of repetition. They virtually created the drone and ambient metal subgenres with their glacial, monolithic exercise Earth 2 in 1993. It arrived (already an outlier) as it hailed from the Pacific Northwest at the dawn of grunge. A series of albums through the rest of the decade cemented that reputation. Earth went on hiatus after 1996's Pentastar: In the Style of Demons due to 's massive personal problems including heroin addiction. After getting sober he re-formed the band with drummer Adrienne Davies in 2003, and in 2005 delivered the arid, brittle yet melodic, psychedelic rock, Gothic Americana, spaghetti western-influenced Hex: Or Printing in the Infernal Method. The band built upon and morphed that record's schematics for a decade, exploring spaces between notes and lingering vibrations. A decade later, they ventured into heavy yet meditative rock with Primitive & Deadly before 2017's Concrete Desert, a collaboration with Kevin Martin (aka ), the king of brittle breaks and left-field sonics.