Black Sabbath - Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is the fifth studio album by British hard rock band Black Sabbath, originally released in December 1973 via Vertigo Records in the UK and Warner Bros. Records in the US.

Considered the pioneers of heavy metal, Black Sabbath defined the genre with releases such as Black Sabbath (1970), Paranoid (1970) and Master of Reality (1971). Selling over 70 million records worldwide, Black Sabbath have been described as the "Greatest Metal Band" of all time by MTV, placing second in VH1's "100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock" list, and ranking at number 85 in Rolling Stone magazine's "100 Greatest Artists of All Time". 

Recorded at Morgan Studios, London, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath continues to build of the stylistic changes Black Sabbath introduced on Vol. 4, incorporating synthesizers, strings, keyboards and more complex arrangements. Familiar heavy metal wonders like “A National Acrobat”, “Looking for Today”, and “Killing Yourself to Live” possess a confident maturity through thought-provoking lyrics and increased melodic sensibilities, while “Sabbra Cadabra”, “Who Are You?” and “Spiral Architect” incorporated both synthesizers (courtesy of Yes legend Rick Wakeman) and orchestral arrangements to great effect.

Drew Struzan (who would later create the iconic cover to Alice Cooper's Welcome to My Nightmare LP) was the artist requested to do the cover painting, under the direction of Pacific Eye & Ear's Ernie Cefalu. The idea behind the artwork was to depict a man dying a horrible death on the front cover, and on the back cover the same man dying a "good" death. It depicts a man on a bed, seemingly having a nightmare or a vision of being attacked by demons in human form. At the top of the bed is a large skull with long, outstretched arms and 666 (the Number of the Beast) written below it. The other side of the album features the opposite of the front cover. In his autobiography Osbourne enthuses, "I fucking loved that cover." The Sabbath Bloody Sabbath artwork continued the Sabbath tradition of offering provocative covers.

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was certified Platinum in the US and Gold in the UK and Canada, and was the band's first album to earn favourable reviews in the mainstream press, with Rolling Stone calling the album "an extraordinarily gripping affair", and "nothing less than a complete success". The album reached #4 on the UK and #11 on the US Billboard 200 Albums charts.

This album is a 2021 limited edition reissue of 2,500 copies on orange and purple splatter coloured vinyl housed in a gatefold sleeve with a printed inner sleeve, pressed in Europe via Sanctuary Records and BMG.