Black Sabbath Vol 4 (CD)

By 1972, Black Sabbath had already invented heavy metal twice over. Vol. 4 is where they started getting weird with it, and that's saying something for a band whose debut track opens with a tritone in a thunderstorm.

Recorded partly at the Record Plant in LA during what the band has described as a chemically enhanced period of their lives, Vol. 4 has a different weight to it than Paranoid or Master of Reality. Supernaut is one of the greatest riffs Tony Iommi ever wrote, Wheels of Confusion sprawls and shifts in ways that feel genuinely psychedelic, and Changes, a piano ballad, somehow fits. This is the record where Sabbath proved they were more than a horror aesthetic and a doom groove, that there was real compositional ambition underneath all the black. The template for doom metal, stoner rock, and half of what alternative and industrial music would eventually reach for when it wanted to go heavier.

Heavy and doom metal, essential catalogue. Fans of: Judas Priest, Dio, Motörhead, Danzig.