The heavy metal legends will team up with producer Rick Rubin once again to record the follow-up to 2013’s hugely successful 13 album.
BLACK SABBATH guitarist Tony Iommi, who has battled cancer since 2012, recently hinted that the group’s July 4 gig at London’s Hyde Park could have been the band’s last because the touring can be tough on him. But frontman Ozzy Osbourne now says that the group will record another CD next year.
“The whole SABBATH experience this time around was great,” Ozzy tells Metal Hammer magazine. “We all made friends, we didn’t f**k around, we all knew that we had a job to do, and we did it. It was a lot of fun. So we’re going to do one more album, and a final tour.
“Once the dust settled after the last tour we started discussing the idea, because we were getting asked about it all the time. I said to [wife/manager] Sharon, ‘What’s going on? Because if there’s no more SABBATH, I want to get on with my own thing again,’ and she came back and said, ‘Let me look into it.’ Three weeks later, I asked her about it again, and she said, ‘Oh, I still have to talk to so and so…’ and I said ‘Sharon, I ain’t f**king 21 anymore, if we’re going to do I want to do it before I’m 70!’ Time isn’t on our side! So she made the call and came back and said, ‘Yeah, the record company wants another album.’ I believe [producer] Rick Rubin is going to do it with us again.”
Although the band have no new material written for what will be their fourteenth studio album, Osbourne anticipates that sessions will begin early in 2015.
“It’ll be sooner rather than later,” the singer says. “Obviously a lot of it is coming down to Tony‘s health, he’s obviously got his cancer treatment, but we’ll get onto it next year. I don’t know if we’ll be writing in England or L.A., but I’ll fly to the f**king moon for it if I have to!”
