I should begin with a confession: I am, by all measurable standards, a closet stoner. Not the slack-jawed stereotype who lives inside of a Bob Marley poster, and not the cardigan-wearing medical user with laminated documentation explaining that indica helps their joints or sleep cycle or chronic paradoxical self-diagnosis — but something in between. I’m the kind of weed-adjacent adult who functions perfectly well in daylight, who answers emails on time and folds laundry before it wrinkles, but who later — quietly, privately — ingests enough to stare at a ceiling fan and wonder if it feels centrifugal force emotionally.
It’s a weird place to exist culturally, between the approved therapeutic patient and the recreational cosmic astronaut, but here’s the kicker: both groups meet in the same ritual space when certain music hits. Doom, stoner rock, psychedelic fuzz — these genres are the Switzerland of cannabis subculture. Medical users may arrive seeking relief from anxiety or nerve pain, recreational users arrive seeking mind-expansion or pleasant disintegration of self, but they both end up nodding to the same down-tuned riff, thinking, this is what gravity sounds like. And that’s where Pale Horse Ritual writhes.
Pale Horse Ritual’s new album Diabolic Formation (arriving November 28, 2025), behaves like stoner/doom. It feels like being slowly lowered into syrupy distortion while guitar lines coil around you like phantom limbs. Even if you’ve never been high a day in your life, the song replicates the sensation of being trapped inside your own cinematic brain.
Produced and mixed by guitarist Will Adams (at Green Mountain Ranch and Tell Me About It… Records), the sound feels like the band wanted the album to bleed without hemorrhaging. Paco’s vocals hover between sermon and spell. Matheson’s leads dart in and out like exorcised spirits. Jonah Santa-Barbara’s drumming is the ritual heartbeat. Guest performer Doom Valhalla — an Italian preacher by way of doom theatrics — is exactly the kind of detail that makes this band feel like a séance rather than a nostalgia act. Plenty of modern doom bands cosplay the 70s like it’s a Renaissance fair for people who smell like vinyl sleeves and bong resin. Pale Horse Ritual instead resurrects the aesthetic with actual oxygen — analogue tone, fuzz-thick atmosphere, horror-film theatrics, but without the comic-book posturing. They aren’t imitating the past; they are communing with it.
Their music is slow enough for the reflective mind, heavy enough for the anxious one, atmospheric enough for the dissociative one. Whether you’re smoking to treat pain or to treat boredom or to treat the human condition itself, this band hits the frequency where all those reasons overlap.
Narrowing it down to my top three vinyl-worthy tracks would have been a lot easier if Dr.Green Thumb delivered to my neck of San Diego, but whatever. Here we go:
Track 2. “Wickedness,” one of the three tracks currently available for public consumption, might be the best example of how cannabis minds — medical and recreational alike — converge. It’s immersive, haunting, and psychedelically hypnotic. The organ textures feel like thoughts caught in echo. The fuzz isn’t decorative as much as foundational in principality. This is music for anyone who has ever stared at a candle flame and thought, I’m learning something here, even if I can’t explain what.
Track 4: “Save You” gives the same October front porch- coffee and fallen leaves- vibe as Eric Clapton’s ” Layla “ (which is my eternal fall jam), but far more demanding of the dark tints in all the right places to feel like the perfect soundtrack to incredible sex.
Track 5: “Bloody Demon” This is where the rock’ n’ roll spirit breaks through the grave dirt — upbeat, saturated, hook-driven, but still caked in ritual smoke. It’s doom you can actually dance to. Or at least sway to with the slow confidence of someone who ate an edible 30 minutes ago and is now fully aware of their knees as independent entities.
You can buy two distinguishably sexy vinyl versions of the album here.
