Paranoid by Black Sabbath

Paranoid, Black Sabbath's second album, crawled out of the murk on 18 September 1970 on Vertigo in Britain, with Warner Bros. bringing it to America on 7 January 1971, and heavy music has been living in its shadow ever since. Fresh off the success of their debut, the band hurried back into the studio with producer Rodger Bain and knocked the whole thing out in two days in June. You can hear the speed in it: no polish, no second-guessing, just riffs the size of steel mills and a groove that lumbers like a tank through wet cement.

"War Pigs" is a doom-laden epic that grinds and then gallops. "Iron Man" stomps in on a riff heavy enough to crack pavement. "Fairies Wear Boots" swings and snarls. And the title track, a jittery, breakneck blast over almost before it starts, climbed to number four on the UK singles chart, the only time the band ever cracked the top 20 there. It even topped Billboard's Hot Hard Rock Songs chart for the first time in July 2025, 55 years after it came out.

It was also the only Sabbath album to go to number one in Britain until 13 arrived in 2013. Time has only raised its stock: it is widely held up as one of the earliest and most influential heavy metal records ever made, and in 2017 it was named the greatest metal album of all time on one prominent list.

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