Rick Rubin – Skin Back Alley

Black Sabbath at the Grammy Awards

Speaking to the UK’s Metal Hammer magazine, Ozzy Osbourne has exclusively revealed that Black Sabbath are to record a new album together.

The heavy metal icons will team up with super-producer Rick Rubin once again to make the follow-up to 2013’s hugely successful LP, 13.

The band have been reticent about their future together, suggesting that a new album was by no means definite, and that their London shows this past summer might well be their last.

However, in interview with Metal Hammer Ozzy said: “The whole Sabbath experience this time around was great. 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 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.”

Ozzy confirmed that the band currently had no new material written, but suggested that the sessions will take place in the early part of 2015: “It’ll be sooner rather than later,” he insisted. “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!”

Watch this space!

As previously reported at Skin Back Alley, The Smashing Pumpkins are to reissue their 1998 album Adore on the 23rd September in a new deluxe edition.

The reissue is set to feature numerous unreleased tracks, b-sides and demos, and Smashies mastermind Billy Corgan has now shared one of those previously unreleased songs, “Let Me Give the World to You.”

Produced by Rick Rubin, the song was recorded for Adore but left off the final album. It later appeared in a different version on Smashing Pumpkins’ 2000 album, Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music.

You can listen to the previously unreleased version of the song below: