Paranoid

Four working class kids from Birmingham, England, recorded this entire album in six days. Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward had grown up in the industrial shadow of the Midlands, and the music they made sounded exactly like that. Heavy, ugly, dark, and completely unlike anything anyone had heard before. When Paranoid came out in September 1970, heavy metal as a genre barely existed. By the time people finished listening to it, the entire blueprint had been laid out.

The title track almost didn't exist. The band had finished recording and realized they were short on material. Iommi played a guitar riff, Butler came up with the lyrics in about twenty minutes, and the whole thing was done in roughly two hours. That afterthought became one of the most recognizable songs in rock history and the band's only top ten single. "War Pigs," which opens the album, was originally called "Walpurgis" and had been reworked after the original lyrics were deemed too explicitly satanic. "Iron Man" tells the story of a time traveler turned to steel who returns to destroy the world he was trying to save. These were not the concerns of folk singers and psychedelic rock bands. This was something else entirely.

Critics loathed it. Audiences could not get enough. Paranoid topped the UK charts and launched a lineage of bands, from Metallica to Black Flag to Soundgarden, who all heard something essential in the weight and doom of what these four guys built in less than a week. If you have never sat with this record, start with "War Pigs" and understand why every heavy band that followed owes it an enormous debt.