Black Sabbath are to record a final album together, Ozzy Osbourne has exclusively revealed to Metal Hammer.
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.
Speaking to Classic Rock at the end of 2013, Ozzy, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler were hesitant about the possibility of making one final Sabbath album - “I don’t know if it would be the right thing to do,” Iommi admitted. “But who knows. The history of this band has taught me to never say never” - but frontman Ozzy now says that the band will begin work on the album next year.
“The whole Sabbath experience this time around was great,” says Ozzy. “We all made friends, we didn’t fuck 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 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 fucking 21 any more, if we’re going to do it 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 Rick Rubin is going to do it with us again.”
Although the trio have no new material written for what will be Sabbath’s twentieth studio album, Osbourne anticipates that sessions will begin early in 2015.
“It’ll be sooner rather than later,” the singer insists. “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 LA, but I’ll fly to the fucking moon for it if I have to!”
