Photo by Ross Halfin
Tony Iommi premiered "World Alone" this morning at a global streaming event in Birmingham, a few minutes' walk from the canal bridge the city renamed for Black Sabbath in 2019. It's the first sound from From The Dark, out October 23 on BMG and his first solo album in over 20 years.
"World Alone" comes out swinging. Iommi keeps the riffs coming, peppers the song with solos, and gives Jorn Lande plenty of room to soar.
The video builds a retro-future dystopia around a character called The Believer, who gets dropped into a twisted video game and has to survive it to find any kind of salvation. Guitarists who'd rather learn the thing than watch it can pull "World Alone" up on Gibson's play-along app.
Lande sings across all of From The Dark and shares a writing credit on every song. Becky Baldwin plays bass, Karl Brazil drums. Iommi produced with Mike Exeter, his engineer and co-writer going back years. Exeter and Brazil both worked on "Deified," the instrumental Iommi released in 2024.
Iommi isn't overselling it. "It's an album we've really enjoyed making," he says. "We're not trying to prove anything — it's a great album, it rocks!"
He'd been at it a while. Iommi told SiriusXM's Trunk Nation last July that he was making his own record until Back To The Beginning came up, at which point he stopped to concentrate on the Sabbath performance and picked the album back up afterward. That show, the all-day homecoming in Birmingham, turned out to be one of the last times Ozzy Osbourne performed live. He died weeks later.
Iommi finished the album after returning from Back To The Beginning. He's 78 now, still playing the way a factory press made him play at 17, strings slackened and tuning dropped to work around two lost fingertips. In 2021 he said he had four or five hundred unused riffs sitting on his phone, waiting for the right home.
From The Dark arrives October 23, and we have the exclusive on the "White & Black Marble" double LP, limited to 1,000 copies. You can pre-order it from our shop.
