I’ll start with a confession that probably doesn’t make me look great: when ‘From The Dark’ was announced, my first reaction wasn’t excitement but a certain unease. Only a few months had passed since ‘Back To The Beginning’, since that afternoon at Villa Park when Black Sabbath said goodbye with Ozzy Osbourne seated on a throne, and then came the news we had all been dreading and nobody was ready to read. Part of me felt that had been the right ending, the perfect close to a story that began in Aston at the end of the sixties, and that anything coming after it would be an unnecessary epilogue. I was half wrong, which is the most honest way I can sum up what this record did to me after several days of listening to it at home, in the car and on headphones at hours when nobody should still be awake.
You have to understand how unusual this album is within Tony Iommi‘s career. In more than fifty years, the man has released just three records with his name on the cover. ‘Iommi’, in 2000, was a kind of party with guests, a different singer on every song, and although it had some very good moments it felt more like a catalogue of friendships than a body of work. ‘Fused’, in 2005, was something else: a two-man record with Glenn Hughes that has earned a small cult following over the years, and rightly so. After that, Iommi poured all his energy into Heaven And Hell and the Sabbath reunion, so these twenty-one years of solo silence weren’t idle ones; he was busy being the backbone of two of the most important bands the genre has ever had. That’s why ‘From The Dark’ arrives carrying a question that has nothing to do with nostalgia: what does Iommi do when Sabbath isn’t behind him, when there’s no longer a shared history to protect?
The answer starts with the singer, and here I have to admit that Jørn Lande was never one of my favourite vocalists. I always respected him for his records with Masterplan and his solo career, but his style, so openly indebted to Ronnie James Dio, sometimes sounded more like a costume than a personality to me. Lande had already sung alongside Iommi and Geezer Butler at the Dio tribute at High Voltage in 2010, a couple of months after Ronnie’s death, and I suppose something about that night stayed with Iommi for sixteen years. What surprised me about ‘From The Dark’ is that Lande doesn’t come across as a hired voice: he wrote all the lyrics and shares credits on all eight songs, and you can hear it in the way the vocal melodies are built to fit the spaces the riff leaves open rather than sitting on top of it. The band is completed by Becky Baldwin, bassist with Mercyful Fate, and Karl Brazil, a drummer with a long career in pop who sounds surprisingly at home here, while Mike Exeter, Iommi’s longtime accomplice who had already worked on ’13’, co-produces and handles keyboards.
When ‘Over The Violent Sun’ kicks in, something happens that I get with very few guitarists: I recognise Iommi before I can explain why. It’s that low tuning, that slightly dragging attack, that way of letting a note rot a little before letting it go. You know the story of the fingertips he lost in a factory at seventeen, the homemade thimbles, the lighter, slackened strings so he could keep playing, and it’s impossible not to think that the entire sound of heavy metal was born from an accident and the stubbornness of a Birmingham kid who refused to put down the guitar. Half a century later, that same sound opens the album with a mid-tempo riff that smells of the eighties, and what grabbed me most, oddly enough, wasn’t the guitar but Baldwin’s bass, which instead of doubling the riff walks off on its own and gives the song a swing I didn’t see coming. It’s one of those choices you only notice when you pay attention, and it’s exactly what separates a band from a guitarist with session players.
With ‘Black Times’ the album sinks. I can’t find another word for it. The tempo drops to a crawl and at times I felt like I was listening to early Candlemass, which carries a beautiful irony, because Candlemass wouldn’t exist without the music Iommi wrote in 1970. Lande sings about a world coming to an end with an almost liturgical gravity, and just when I thought the song was going to stay stuck in that swamp, Iommi opens a door onto a clean, almost ballad-like passage, with guitars that ring like distant bells. That turn reminded me why I’ve always defended the Sabbath records people forget, the ones from the Tony Martin era like ‘Headless Cross’ or ‘Tyr’, where Iommi allowed himself these shifts in atmosphere without asking anyone’s permission. Plenty of today’s doom bands have spent decades repeating the heavy half of the formula while forgetting that the master always knew when to release the pressure.
‘World Alone’ was the first taste, and the first time I heard it, back in July, it struck me as solid and not much more. Inside the album, though, it grows enormously. The stop-start riff, lurching forward and braking as if someone had yanked the handbrake on a lorry, takes me straight back to the ‘Sabotage’ era, and the solos Iommi slips between the verses are among the best I’ve heard from him in years: melodic, unhurried, with the sense that every note was chosen rather than simply played. This is where Lande really shines for the first time, with an almost operatic performance that, I’ll admit, made me rethink my prejudices about him. He isn’t Dio, and isn’t trying to be at this point, but he has the chest and the theatricality to stand up to a riff that size without getting flattened.
‘Beyond The Dead’ was the surprise I never saw coming. It has a melodic hook so catchy that at times the song seems to flirt with something like dark cabaret, a kind of funereal love song tucked inside a suit of doom armour, and on the third day I caught myself humming it in the shower, which almost never happens to me with recent classic metal records. ‘Stormwatcher’, on the other hand, goes the opposite way: a sparse, almost naked riff that moves with deliberate slowness while Brazil’s drums and Baldwin’s bass rumble as though the song had been recorded inside a cathedral. Its solo is one of the most beautiful on the album, built on melodic phrases that float above the wall of sound, and it’s one of those moments when you stop analysing and simply sit still.
But here I have to be honest, otherwise this review wouldn’t be worth anything. Somewhere between ‘Beyond The Dead’ and ‘Stormwatcher’ I started to feel something that kept growing with every listen: the album almost always moves between two speeds, heavy mid-tempo and glacial crawl, and that alternation repeats with such regularity that at some point the songs start to blur together. Lande doesn’t help, because his range here swings between a full-throated roar and a dramatic, very Dio-like croon, with very little ground in between. Heard one by one, every one of these songs convinces me, but listening straight through there was one night when I realised I had no idea which track I was on, and with an eight-song record that shouldn’t happen. It isn’t a serious problem, but it’s the difference between a good album and one that haunts you for weeks.
Just as I was starting to resign myself to that inertia, ‘Death Wake’ arrives, and for me it’s the emotional heart of the album. It’s the closest thing to a power ballad on the record, although that label falls short: it’s more of a funeral march, delicate in its structure, with the band rising and falling with a precision that gives away hours of rehearsal. Lande sings here with a restraint he shows nowhere else, and it’s his best performance on the entire album, no contest. And then Brian May appears, with that instantly recognisable sound of his, fluid and almost orchestral, in gorgeous contrast with Iommi’s rougher attack. Iommi has said he asked May to play on more songs and that his friend of nearly sixty years turned him down because it was Tony’s album. I understand the courtesy, but after hearing those two guitars talk to each other, I kept thinking about what a whole album of that conversation might have sounded like. I can’t listen to ‘Death Wake’ without thinking about everything Iommi has lost in recent years, Dio, Ozzy, and although the record never spells it out, this song carries that grief in a way that felt genuine and not calculated at all.
‘Return Of The Arbalist’ is the song the album needed most and the one I was most grateful for. Finally the tempo picks up, the track gallops like an early-eighties British heavy metal classic, and Iommi bends and holds notes with a joy you can hear. Baldwin and Brazil push with a swing that appears nowhere else on the album, and for a few minutes ‘From The Dark’ completely breaks the formula that had been tying it down. It leaves me with a bittersweet feeling, because it proves the band could move with much more freedom and that, for whatever reason, they chose not to do it more often.
And then comes ‘Legacy’, just over seven minutes that justify this album’s existence on their own. The descending riff it opens with is enormous, the kind that seems to walk down a staircase into a bottomless basement, and the reference is unavoidable: this is the ‘Mob Rules’ era, this is ‘Sign Of The Southern Cross’ in its 2026 version. Lande delivers the most Dio-like performance of his entire career here, and the curious thing is that in this context it didn’t bother me at all, because it feels less like imitation and more like a conscious tribute, as if the song were a place where Ronnie is still allowed to live. Baldwin plays a bass line that works as counterpoint rather than filler, Brazil syncopates with enviable precision, and Iommi treats himself to two solos, one electric and one that sounds acoustic, both played with a looseness that at 78 ought to be illegal. That the album ends with a song carrying that title, after everything that has happened, doesn’t strike me as a coincidence, and I’ll confess that the first time I reached the end I sat in silence for a while before putting the record on again from the top.
As for the production, Iommi and Exeter pulled off something that isn’t common on records by veterans: a modern, huge sound with well-distributed layers that never falls into the plastic sheen that ruins so many legends’ comebacks. The guitar sounds thick and round, with exactly the weight you expect, and Exeter’s keyboards work as background fog rather than as a lead voice. My complaint, and it’s not a small one, is the length. Eight new songs after a twenty-one-year wait feels like too few, especially when Iommi himself has said he has hundreds of riffs stored on his phone. The deluxe CD edition adds ‘Scent Of Dark’ and ‘Deified’, the pieces he released in 2022 and 2024 tied to his fragrances, but we already knew them and they don’t fill the gap of unreleased material you’re left craving.
After a lot of back and forth, I think ‘From The Dark’ has more in common with ‘The Devil You Know’ and the Sabbath records with Tony Martin than with any of Iommi’s previous solo work, and to me that’s a compliment. It isn’t an album that’s going to change the history of metal, nor does it try to be; Iommi already did that fifty-six years ago and owes nobody anything. What it is, though, is the portrait of a musician who still finds pleasure in playing, who chose a band that understands him and who can still write riffs that make guitarists half his age look ridiculous. Its middle stretch is too uniform and its singer sometimes lacks nuance, and that’s why I don’t consider it a classic, but ‘World Alone’, ‘Death Wake’, ‘Return Of The Arbalist’ and ‘Legacy’ will keep playing at home long after the excitement of the release has faded, and for a record by a 78-year-old man who had nothing left to prove, I can’t think of better proof that it was worth making.
