Black Sabbath

The line of horror-film fans outside the cinema and Butler's nightmarish experience became a single song. It is the moment when the band's name and the grammar of a genre were born together.

• The first 30 seconds or so are rain, thunder and a church bell tolling in the distance. Laid down over a sound-effects tape, this introduction opens the whole album like a horror film.
• Iommi's riff strikes a note in octaves, then slides to a clashing interval (the tritone). He recalled that his Stratocaster's pickup broke during the recording, so he used the Gibson SG he had brought as a spare, and he put a device that boosts the high end (a treble booster) in front of his Laney amp to get a thick, tearing tone.
• Osbourne sings as a terrified first-person narrator, as if pleading with the figure before his eyes. Trembling and desperation come before technique.
• Late in the song, around the 4½-minute mark, the tempo suddenly speeds up and shifts into a shuffle rhythm. In the passage where Ward's drums and Butler's bass heat up like a blues jam, their roots as a club band show through.
• Because it was recorded in a single day with all four playing at once, the sound is unpolished and the room's resonance remains intact. That roughness became the very texture of terror.

An antiwar indictment written by Butler under the shadow of the Vietnam War. Contrary to the misconception of a Satan-worshipping band, it makes clearest what they were angry about.

• Over a sound like an air-raid siren, slow, heavy chords ring out; then follows a call-and-response structure in which Osbourne sings in the gaps where the guitar stops and the band answers with short stabs.
• Ward's drumming is closer to the hands of a jazz drummer than to metal drumming. Listen for the rolling cymbals and the fills (short ornamental passages) that pack the space between beats, and you can hear his swing.
• Osbourne paints the scene of judgment as if preaching to the powerful, yet calmly. Rather than shouting his anger, he builds it coldly on a monotonous melody.
• In the instrumental middle section, Iommi's solo is double-tracked left and right and spreads wide. On headphones, the guitars seem to converse from either side.
• The closing instrumental section ends with the tape sped up, so the sound grows faster and higher. Live, they stretched this passage out at length.

A song made up on the spot to fill out the album became the band's biggest hit. Alongside the antiwar indictment, it is a short monologue about depression and anxiety.

• A song of under 3 minutes, with no chorus, in which riff and verse repeat breathlessly. On an album where other tracks ran past 7 minutes, the brevity itself was radical.
• Iommi's riff rapidly hammers out chords that sound only two notes for a thick ring (power chords), and Butler's bass doubles it exactly and drives it forward. The two moving as one body is the song's engine.
• Osbourne confesses the sickness of his own mind in a quick, monotonous tone, as if complaining to someone. His flat delivery, which never lets the emotion burst out, only heightens the unease.
• The middle solo sounds rougher and more metallic than the riffs around it. Short as it is, it feels like the song's only breathing hole.
• Live, it was the encore that closed their shows, and both the final concert of 2017 and the final stage of 2025 ended with it.

The choice to lower the strings to ease the pain in his fingertips created the sound of doom metal. It is an album on which a wound became a tone.

• This is the first album on which Iommi tuned his guitar strings down a step and a half (downtuning). Played right after its predecessor, you can immediately hear the guitar settle lower and murkier, heavy as mud.
• In “Children of the Grave,” the video chosen for this card, Ward and Butler create a rhythm that lurches forward like galloping horses. This galloping rhythm later became a favorite pattern of metal bands.
• The opening track, “Sweet Leaf,” begins with a repeated sound of coughing. It is an example of an experimental studio prank becoming part of a song.
• Short acoustic pieces such as “Embryo” and “Orchid,” and “Solitude,” on which Iommi played flute, sit like rests between the heavy songs. Weight sounds greater when there is contrast.

This is the album that broke a slump in which no songs would come, in the dungeon of Clearwell Castle. Keyboards and orchestra were added on top of the heaviness, and the band’s sound grew wider.

• “Sabbra Cadabra,” the video chosen for this card, is a love song that opens with a lively, bouncing riff. Metallica recorded it in 1998, and it became this album's hidden signature track.
• In the second half of “Sabbra Cadabra,” Yes’s Rick Wakeman plays piano and Minimoog (an early portable synthesizer). Listen for the moment when the keyboards wrap around the riff and the song turns toward boogie (a lively piano blues).
• The title track draws a dramatic contrast between soft verses laced with acoustic guitar and an overwhelmingly slow, heavy riff. The riff Iommi is said to have found in the castle dungeon erupts from the middle onward.
• The recording is more intricate than on earlier albums, with guitars stacked in layers and spread wide from left to right. This is the album that moves from the sound of four people playing in one room to a sound built in the studio.

This is the song with which a band that nearly collapsed after losing Osbourne stood up again on Dio’s voice. Here began a Black Sabbath with the same name and a different way of speaking.

• What drives the whole song is a recurring bass line. Listen to the bass before the guitar, and the skeleton of the song comes into view.
• Unlike Osbourne’s wail, Dio addresses the audience in a powerful, soaring operatic voice, like a storyteller recounting the choice between good and evil.
• Producer Martin Birch’s sound is far cleaner and more solid than 1970s Sabbath. The drums are distinctly separated, and the guitars are less muddy.
• A song of nearly seven minutes: past the middle the tempo picks up and Iommi’s solo explodes, and it closes with a quiet acoustic guitar ending.
• Live, Dio would often trade lines with the audience, stretching the song well past ten minutes.

A song from 13, the first studio album Osbourne, Iommi, and Butler made together in thirty-five years, since Never Say Die! in 1978. As Rick Rubin asked, they returned to the slow, dark sound of their debut days.

• A song of nearly nine minutes, it opens with quietly picked bass and guitar, and only much later does the heavy riff come in. Like their debut song, it is built to raise tension slowly.
• Rage Against the Machine’s Brad Wilk handled the drums, and his playing sways loosely rather than locking in like tight metal drumming, so it sounds as if he had Ward’s swing in mind.
• Butler’s lyrics take up doubts about faith and violence, and Osbourne sings them calmly, like the monologue of someone who has lost his certainty. The theme that Butler, raised in a Catholic family, held onto all his life has returned.
• Iommi recorded this guitar while undergoing treatment for lymphoma. The weight of the riff and its long, drawn-out notes deliberately revive the sound of the 1970 debut album.
• With this song the band won the 2014 Grammy for Best Metal Performance.