Never Say Die! by Black Sabbath

Never Say Die!, Black Sabbath's eighth studio album, hit the racks on Vertigo in September 1978, and it's the sound of a band pulling in six directions at once. Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward produced it themselves, and for the original four this was the end of the road in the studio: it was Ozzy's last studio album with the band until 13 in 2013, and by 1979 he'd been fired.

You can hear the strain and the restlessness. Like the albums leading up to it, it wanders off from the doom-and-thunder blueprint into experimental and progressive corners, even pop-rock ones, and critics weren't buying all of it, calling it unbalanced and complaining that its energy got scattered all over the map. Still, it had legs: the album finally went Gold in the US in November 1997.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.