If you’ve ever driven through Reno, you already understand why a sludge metal band could be born there. The city feels like the place you go when Las Vegas is too ambitious. There’s neon, but it flickers. There’s nightlife, but it smells like truck stop coffee and pre-rolled joints. Reno is where hope goes to gamble and learns probability instead. And if you listen closely, buried underneath the slot machines and the dry desert wind, you can hear a slow, tectonic rumble that sounds suspiciously like the guitar tone of Weight of the Tide.
Formed by a group of local scene veterans, Mark Moots, Jes Phipps, Jason Thomas, and Marcus Mayhall, Weight of the Tide plays what critics call “sludge” or “post-metal,” but that’s a little like calling Hemingway a “fiction writer.” It’s technically true, but it misses the emotional function of the thing. What they really play is sentimental heaviness, the sound of four people trying to locate meaning in a genre that already promised there wasn’t any. Their riffs drag, their drums churn, and their vocals alternate between anguish and resignation, like two narrators arguing about whether catharsis is even possible anymore.
Their newest album, What Pale Victory, could double as a dissertation on endurance. Jes Phipps was diagnosed with cancer during its creation, and somehow the band decided the appropriate response to that existential threat was to make something even heavier. You can hear it in the way the songs crawl toward light instead of away from it, the riffs sound like they’ve been through chemotherapy too, melted down to their rawest mineral essence. Mark Moots said the album is about “appreciating life while acknowledging death,” which is also the thesis statement of every great metal record ever made, though few state it that directly.
It’s tempting to reduce Weight of the Tide to their stylistic ancestry, Neurosis DNA with a Mastodon metabolism, but that flattens the human weirdness that makes them matter. These are the kind of guys who believe there’s something existentially sacred about starting the day with black coffee and a perfect metal riff. It’s not just caffeine or distortion, it’s a ritual of defiance. This is the paradox of Reno musicians: they recognize the absurdity of their own devotion, yet they still commit to it completely. They can see the joke, but they’ll still bleed for the punchline.
And because sincerity is the final frontier in a genre obsessed with irony, Moots started a podcast with Eric Stangeland called Mix Tapes. This project is both profoundly metal and profoundly human. The podcast isn’t some gimmick or side hustle; it’s a conversational séance for people who still care about riffs as metaphors for existence. Imagine two old friends discussing guitars, death, and philosophy like they’re trying to tune the meaning of life down to Drop C. It’s not really about promotion or nostalgia. It’s about processing, about what happens when the people who make the noise start listening to themselves for once.
You can indulge in Mix Tapes on Apple Podcasts, here. You can absorb Weight of the Tide here. And you can catch the band live at The Alpine in Reno on November 18th, opening for Soulfly.
