Think about what the last eighteen months looked like from inside that house in Birmingham. In July 2025 Black Sabbath played their final show, Back To The Beginning, in their home city. Weeks later Ozzy Osbourne was gone. Most men at 78 would let that be the last page. Tony Iommi went back into the studio.
From The Dark, released 23 October 2026 on BMG, is Tony Iommi’s first solo album in twenty-one years, since Fused in 2005. Eight tracks, every one of them co-written and sung by Jørn Lande, the Norwegian vocalist of Jorn, Masterplan and the Allen/Lande records. Iommi’s own summary is typically Black Country dry: “It’s an album we’ve really enjoyed making. We’re not trying to prove anything – it’s a great album, it rocks!” The opener Over the Violent Sun says the rest: a down-tuned Iommi riff of the kind that has been imitated for fifty years and still only sounds like this when his fretboard-tipped fingers play it.
The Lande choice is quietly perfect. Iommi has spent his solo career working with singers who carry weight without imitating anyone (Glenn Hughes on the previous two), and Lande is Norway’s great dramatic rock voice, a man who grew up on exactly this vocabulary. For this site the pairing closes a loop we keep tracing: the Norwegian scene that Enslaved and the whole second wave built exists because of the blueprint this one guitarist drew in 1970. Now the blueprint hires Norwegian.
The weight of the record is impossible to separate from the year it comes out of. We have pointed at the Sabbath songbook before, playfully, through Jack Black singing Mr Crowley and the War Pigs tribute around Geezer Butler. This is the serious end of the same lineage: the man who invented the heavy metal riff, one year after burying the band that carried it, proving the riff itself is not done with him yet.
Play World Alone above. The title reads differently once you know the year behind it, and the riff reads like it always has: like the foundation.
Listen to this: From The Dark
