Retro Band Profile: Kyuss That was Kyuss in 1992. While the world cast their eyes northwestward towards Seattle, the wastelands around Palm Desert. CA were breeding their own fuzzed out and sun-baked brand of so-called ‘stoner rock’. Lables and sub-genres are often trite and can miss the point completely, but if one is intimately familiar with their lineage, they can sensibly ‘catagorize’ a band, if for no other reason than to have a reference point to describe a shared sound within a genre. Case in point: ‘stoner rock’ is often interchangeable with ‘desert rock’, a sub-genre of metal that combines elements of heavy metal, acid rock, blues metal and doom metal. With that much metal, you know this rock comes with some weight.