Vol 4 by Black Sabbath

Vol. 4, Black Sabbath's fourth album, lumbered out on Vertigo on 25 September 1972, and for the first time the band did without producer Rodger Bain. Tony Iommi took the job himself, cutting it at the Record Plant; manager Patrick Meehan got a co-producer credit, though he had little to do with the actual work.

The Birmingham originals are all here, Ozzy Osbourne wailing, Iommi's guitar, Geezer Butler's bass and Bill Ward's drums, and the sound picks up right where Master of Reality left off: slow, huge and crushing, with "Snowblind" grinding away like a steamroller. But they go wandering too, and "Changes" and "FX" poke into stranger corners. The critics sniffed again and the fans didn't care: it reached number 5 in the UK and number 13 in the US, where it went platinum, and these days it is counted among Sabbath's best and a fixture on lists of the greatest heavy metal albums.

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