Despite insisting that they weren’t going to release another album, Black Sabbath have announced that they have one more in the works – but it will only be sold on their forthcoming tour.
Towards the end of last year, Ozzy Osbourne shot down rumours of a new album in an interview with Digital Spy, saying, “We were gonna do [another album] before the tour, but it would take three or four years to write and record an album, by which time I’ll be fucking 73 or 72 or something, so we decided just to a farewell tour.”
This slightly contradicted what guitarist Toni Iommi told Gigwise in October: “We’ve got some tracks that we recorded before with Rick Rubin in LA,” he replied. “When we did our last album we made 16 tracks, but we only put eight on the album so there are tracks there that could possibly show their face at some point.”
The band have now confirmed that they will be releasing a new album, and that it’ll be a tour-only release consisting of eight tracks. Some of these tracks were recording during sessions for their previous album, “13”, while others are live versions of previously released tracks.
“We thought we’d put out an album of 13 songs,” bassist Geezer Butler explained to Billboard, “but when we were in the studio we wrote another three songs, which brought it up to 16 and then we left it to Rick Rubin to pick which songs would go on the album, and to give it some light and shade he picked the eight songs that were on the 13 album.”
He continued, “We put a few songs on deluxe versions of the album and then we had the four left over, and we decided to do a gig-only CD.”
Meanwhile, the band will be back in the UK to headline Download Festival 2016, alongside Iron Maiden and Rammstein. Download takes place between 10-12 June. For tickets and more information, click here.
European tour dates are as follows :
Jun 2016
01 – Papp Laszlo Arena , Budapest £ 74.53
08 – Waldbuhne , Berlin £ 210.07
13 – Arena Verona , Verona £ 182.17
15 – Hallenstadion Zurich , Zurich £ 152.00
28 – Stadthalle Vienna , Vienna £ 132.82
30 – Prague £ 85.41
Jul 2016
02 – Krakow £ 130.38
07 – Helsinki £ 124.97
09 – Solna £ 124.97
