"Are you high? So am I!" Black Sabbath's Ozzy Osbourne infamously exclaimed on a live recording of "Hole in the Sky." The vocalist, Tony Iommi and the rest of the Sabbath crew got the stoner ball rolling before anyone even realized what the band was doing with those herculean riffs. It would be a while before heavy metal, the genre they spawned, would become fully realized and even longer before their impact was felt among the stoner rock and metal community that began to develop in the early 1990s.

With one unifying bond, both the rock and metal sides concocted their own version of the riff-centric, fuzz-drenched bass grooving stoner realm. The genre's parameters are often blurred with sludge and doom having a foot in both worlds, making distinct and complete "stoner metal" and "stoner rock" labels a bit ambiguous.

We've done our best to stay true to what, at the heart of it, not only sounds deserving of the genre tag, but feels deserving. It's admittedly a loose definition, but after scrolling through these picks, hopefully you'll understand the angle taken here.

Now, turn your attention to the gallery below as we count down the 11 Best Stoner Albums!

11 Best Stoner Rock + Metal Albums

Top 25 Hard Rock + Metal Live Albums

10 Best Tony Iommi Riffs