Paranoid

Black Sabbath · 1970 · Heavy Metal

The album that invented the vocabulary everything heavy still borrows from.

Release

1970-09-18

Label

Vertigo

Producer

Rodger Bain

Paranoid is where the riff became the subject rather than the accompaniment. Iommi's tone — thin strings, detuned, played through a broken-in stack — is the origin point, and Osbourne's melodies give the doom a pop-shaped hook it never lost.