For years, the earliest recordings Tony Iommi ever made with the band that would become Black Sabbath, back when they were still called Earth, sat tangled in a legal dispute that kept them from the public entirely. That dispute has now been resolved, and the four founding members have regained full ownership of the material they recorded at Zella Studios in Birmingham back in 1969, months before Earth changed its name to Black Sabbath.
The band’s first manager, Jim Simpson, had announced plans in June 2025 to release the recordings as The Legendary Lost 1969 Tapes, with a target date of that July. The release never happened. Sharon Osbourne later revealed a behind-the-scenes standoff over ownership, telling Simpson in writing that the band had not even heard the tapes despite his promises to provide copies, and that legal action would follow if he moved ahead without their consent.
The dispute was eventually settled, with Sharon confirming that all four members now jointly own the recordings and that Simpson ultimately did right by the band in how it was resolved. She has since said she’d be open to releasing the material at some point, calling it historically significant for fans of the genre, but only with the full band’s approval on how and when that happens.
That backdrop makes Iommi‘s own comments to Rolling Stone, made while promoting his new solo album, land with extra weight. Asked directly whether the recordings would finally see daylight, he confirmed it plainly: “They will come out at some point,” he said. “It’s weird when you hear stuff from so long ago, and all these things crop up that you forgot about.”
What he heard when he went back and listened surprised even him. “The sound and everything. Bloody hell, we’d done it in a little studio. But it was fun to hear them, actually. I sat listening to them all, and it was good because there’s some jazzy stuff and bluesy stuff we did on them where we just used to jam.” He added that a good deal of that material was pure instrumental improvisation, guitar-only jamming he can no longer play. “On a lot of the jams, it was all guitar, and I forgot about half of that. I can’t play that now.”
It’s a fitting piece of news to land the same month as From the Dark, Iommi‘s first solo album in more than two decades, due Oct. 23. There’s a symmetry to it: a 78-year-old guitarist digging up material from the absolute beginning of his career just as he’s putting out something entirely new, decades after the fact.
Sometimes Iommi needs to remind himself to write songs that sound a little more upbeat. “I tend to always start off with the doomy stuff,” he said, laughing at his own predictability. “It always has been that way. I just get absorbed with doomy riffs. It’s a feeling I get when I play something heavy and powerful. I still like the up-tempo stuff, of course, though.”
That tension between instinct and intention runs straight through the record. The lead single, “World Alone,” is proof he can still deliver on the up-tempo promise without losing an ounce of weight: a walloping riff, a snarling solo, and vocals from Norwegian singer Jørn Lande that push the track somewhere between Black Sabbath‘s Mob Rules era and something distinctly its own.
The album arrives after a year that reshaped everything for Iommi. Since Black Sabbath played their final show at Ozzy Osbourne‘s farewell concert, Back to the Beginning, he has kept a low profile, quietly refining ideas that trace back at least five years, including two instrumental tracks he originally recorded to accompany his own perfume line. As those ideas accumulated, he decided the material deserved a proper, dedicated band rather than another scattered collection of guest vocalists.
That distinction matters to him. His only prior true solo full-length was 2000’s Iommi, an album that rotated in a different singer for nearly every track, including Billy Corgan and Henry Rollins. Two further records, The 1996 DEP Sessions and Fused, both featured former Deep Purple vocalist Glenn Hughes. Seventh Star, from 1986, gets left out of the count entirely, since the label insisted on crediting it to Black Sabbath despite being conceived as a solo work. For From the Dark, co-produced with longtime engineer Mike Exeter, Iommi wanted something closer to an actual band: Lande on vocals, bassist Becky Baldwin of Mercyful Fate and Fury, drummer Karl Brazil, and Exeter on keys. Brian May contributes a guest solo on the standout doom cut “Death Wake.”
The reasoning behind not calling this project Black Sabbath is, in Iommi‘s telling, simple finality. “Black Sabbath’s now finished as far as the band goes, really,” he said. “Obviously, the last stuff was with Ozz. Anything I’d do with Black Sabbath would just be me, and I don’t want to do that again. We’ve been there and done that.” Lande‘s involvement traces back to a Ronnie James Dio tribute performance, where his voice made enough of an impression that Iommi kept him in mind for future work. Lande wrote all his own lyrics for the record, something Iommi insists on with any singer he works with. “It’s good if they can do their own stuff because when they’ve got to sing it, they can put it over better,” he said, drawing a direct line to how Dio used to operate. Much of Lande‘s writing on the album leans into apocalyptic, nuclear-tinged imagery, which Iommi connects to Black Sabbath‘s own history of engaging directly with the world around them. “It’s what’s happening today in the world, really,” he said. “Much like with the old Sabbath stuff, when we did ‘War Pigs,’ that is happening today.”
The album also carries small surprises for longtime fans, including an acoustic solo tucked into the middle of “Legacy,” a format Iommi admits he doesn’t particularly enjoy performing. “I hate playing acoustic,” he said. “I’m not very good at playing acoustic. But on that bit, I just thought it would be nice and different.” His friendship with May, stretching back nearly 60 years to when the two crossed paths in neighboring studios in the early 1970s, made the “Death Wake” cameo an easy ask, though May declined to appear elsewhere on the record, telling Iommi his own solos didn’t need the help.
Much of the conversation inevitably returned to Back to the Beginning and its aftermath. Iommi described the show itself as an emotionally strange experience, made stranger by Osbourne performing seated on a throne rather than moving freely around the stage as he always had. “On this occasion, I couldn’t see him because he’s in that throne at the front,” he said. What neither he nor anyone else in the building knew was how little time remained. Osbourne texted him the night before the show saying he wasn’t feeling well, a message that, in retrospect, reads very differently than it did at the time. “I knew he wasn’t well, but I didn’t expect it to happen that quick,” Iommi said of learning of Osbourne‘s death not long after. A year on, the loss still catches him off guard in ordinary moments. “It’s almost like he’s still here,” he said. “It’s really peculiar.”
Asked whether he considers Black Sabbath‘s story properly finished, Iommi answered without hesitation. “The legacy’s been fantastic, really,” he said. “I think it was a good thing to finish off when we did the Back to the Beginning one, because all the bands who were fans of Sabbath came onto that show, which was just brilliant.”
For now, there are no live plans attached to From the Dark, and Iommi isn’t treating that as a loss. Between regular hospital checkups following his cancer diagnosis and the simple pleasure of having time to actually live with the material rather than race against a deadline, he sounds like a man in no hurry to stop. “I’m not into just retiring and sitting back and doing nothing,” he said. “I have to do something, and music is the only thing I know what to do. I like creating it. I think it’s good for your mind, as well, to be able to make things up and come up with ideas.” Asked what comes after this record, his answer left the door wide open. “I’m not ready to go away yet.”
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