Black Sabbath

So you children of the world

Listen to what I say

If you want a better place to live in

Spread the word today

Show the world that love is still alive

You must be brave

Or you children of today

Are children of the grave, yeah!

Having released their third album in just a year and a half, Black Sabbath effectively complete, with “Master Of Reality”, the foundation of a sound and an imagery that would belong to many of the hardest rock bands to come, heavy metal in general but also doom, stoner and sludge. Listening to the first three chapters of their discography in sequence reveals a rapid evolution, a decisive move away from certain elements and models that are still clearly the inspirations behind the first self-titled album and, to a lesser extent, “Paranoid” (both from 1970).

A few key turning points can be identified, if the reader will forgive a certain narrative simplification. As for the first album, the track “Black Sabbath” introduced the world to the sulfurous side of English hard rock, with Mephistophelian imagery and gloomy guitar riffs, while the Luciferian love song “N.I.B” begins to sketch out a new model that reinforces blues-rock with imposing volumes. The second album continues in the direction of a harder, more explosive and heavier rock, as shown by “Iron Man” and “War Pigs”, with “Paranoid” standing as a substantial (yet important and influential) exception, one that scales down a newly-born heavy metal to bring it back to a more essential song format.

This third “Master Of Reality” works mainly in two directions: it adds new hard rock anthems, largely along the lines of the darker, heavier sound, while also working at the edges of that sound, expanding it with other elements. With no programmatic intent whatsoever, which would seem out of place to attribute to Ozzy Osbourne and co., the first three Black Sabbath albums represent the bare-bones manual — or, to sound loftier, the sacred text — for countless heavy bands of the Eighties and Nineties.

Stoners, darkness and mud: the sacred text of stoner, doom and sludge

Getting into more specific territory, and leaving to the curious reader the already-published milestone reviews of “Black Sabbath” and “Paranoid”, “Master Of Reality” presents itself with eight tracks in 34 minutes. Distorted electric guitar riffs are central, marked by a lower, heavier tone tied to down-tuning. There's the obsessive one on the opening “Sweet Leaf”, launched by Iommi's sampled coughing fit and developed as a slower, more aggressive take on similar tracks from the debut. It's a song for stoners written by stoners, and that alone is enough to make it a cornerstone of stoner rock: taken to the extreme, this idea will become the marijuana anthem for Sleep.

Right after comes a riff as legendary as the one in “Children Of The Grave”, a palm-muted gallop that plays on power chords and spills into slower, sepulchral lunges already firmly in doom territory. Worth mentioning too is the mid-paced stride of “Lord Of This World”, with guitar and bass occasionally taking a step into the abyss at the end of the verses. The murky “Into The Void”, meanwhile, is probably the most plundered moment by stoner and sludge bands, with a riff built on guitar and drums locking together to dwell on the low notes before shifting into a stately trot. With every alternation between mid-tempo and modest bursts of speed, the sound seems to grow ever more numbing.

These riff-driven tracks follow a fairly simple grammar — the harshest critics might call it monotonous — and seem geared more toward sound than composition. It's a pursuit of sonic power, one that builds through repetition rather than variation or eccentric development. The heavy metal riff that Black Sabbath had already perfected with “Iron Man” grows stronger the more it repeats itself unchanged, because each repetition deepens the stupor, overwhelming the listener with the help of generously cranked amplifiers. Any variations, including the aforementioned bursts of speed, mainly serve as a momentary departure from one very precise center of gravity: the distorted guitar riff, dark and obsessive, ever identical to itself.

The rest of the album, however, veers away from these heavy songs, for different reasons. The unusually luminous “After Forever”, with Christian lyrics that clash with the rest of the album and Tony Iommi also on synth, is the most eccentric, out-of-place moment. The other three tracks, by contrast, serve the album's overall arc, rounding out and expanding its language and, in a play of light and shadow, making the riff-driven songs stand out even more.

Before and after “Children Of The Grave”, powerful in sound and menacing in its lyrics about nuclear apocalypse, we find two instrumentals that would have been unthinkable on the first two albums: “Embryo” is a brief, medieval-tinged dance for guitars; “Orchid” is a poignant acoustic-guitar reverie, with tones that verge on the fantastical. This fusion of acoustic, lyrical passages with electric, thunderous ones would prove central for many heavy metal bands, from Iron Maiden to Agalloch and beyond. It doesn't come across, then, as a mere diversion, but as a way of balancing the more physical, obsessive tracks with more lyrical, measured interludes.

The only one missing, so to speak, is “Solitude”, the rightful heir to “Planet Caravan”. It's only on the surface the classic ballad tucked into a metal album, a move that would become common for many bands in the Eighties (Scorpions, Motley Crue, Poison, etc.). Its real reference point is psychedelia, albeit tilted toward the gothic and the decadent: embellished with flute and piano played by Iommi, with Osbourne for once reining in his vocals and opting for an approach where emotional nuance takes precedence, it's actually rendered dreamlike by the combination of delay effects and a Geezer Butler bass riff that carries almost the entire rhythmic weight, alongside the chimes played for the occasion by Bill Ward. The lyrics are shot through with a mournful desolation.

An unrepeatable trilogy and the competition with the two previous masterpieces

In the game of more or less subjective rankings, “Master Of Reality” sometimes wins out over the first two albums. For those who grew up with Kyuss and Orange Goblin, but also Melvins and even part of the grunge scene, it's easy to spot here the origin point of many of their signature moves. From accounts by those involved, we know this was the first album written and recorded with more time available, enough to polish the songs and even try out some slightly different directions. Tony Iommi's role had already become that of the lead figure, despite crucial contributions from the other three. His riffs often grab the listener's attention, with Butler's bass and Ward's drums working in support. Ozzy Osbourne, who was the desperate young man facing Satan on the debut's opening track and the iron monster of “Iron Man”, sees his role somewhat diminished here: excluded (obviously) from the instrumentals, with the harmonica shelved and without the chance (or ability?) to follow the shift toward sludge, doom and stoner, he's arguably the member least aligned with the band's evolution. Yet, in one of rock history's odd twists, his slightly nasal timbre, his vocal delivery that's fairly close to speech, and his anxious, alienated style manage to contrast with the other three's grim onslaught, standing out in the arrangement while the rest of the band melds into a sonic magma of tremendous power.

At home, “Master Of Reality” confirmed its popular success by reaching number five on the charts, better than the debut and only slightly behind the number-one spot achieved by “Paranoid”. In the United States, its number-eight chart position represents the best commercial result of any of the band's studio albums. Sales certifications over time confirm the enormous enthusiasm in the US: a gold record at home is matched by double platinum overseas, testifying to sales surpassing two million copies. Despite being the third of three albums that remain landmarks in heavy music history, and just one entry in a vast discography, at the time of writing two songs from “Master Of Reality” rank among the band's ten most-streamed tracks on Spotify: “Children Of The Grave” (around 180 million streams, at number six) and “Sweet Leaf” (roughly 89 million streams, at number ten).

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05/04/2026

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Antonio Silvestri, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition