BREAKING: Black Sabbath Legendary Guitarist TONY LOMMI Rel..See more
BREAKING: Black Sabbath Legendary Guitarist TONY LOMMI Rel..See more
HEAVEN & HELL ERA: TONY IOMMI’S PICKS FOR BLACK SABBATH “AT ITS BEST”
July 15, 2025
In the vast legacy of Black Sabbath, guitarist Tony Iommi has often reflected on the band’s many incarnations—from the Ozzy Osbourne-led early classics to his time with vocalists Ronnie James Dio, Ian Gillan, Glenn Hughes, and Tony Martin. But pressed to name the album when Sabbath reached its peak at last, Iommi hesitated not at all: The Devil You Know, the debut of Heaven & Hell’s Dio-fronted band, is “the band at its best.”
Following the departure of Ozzy in the late 1970s, Sabbath went through a tectonic shift with Dio joining in 1979. The new band brought fresh energy to the music of Sabbath, allowing Iommi to play around with quicker tempos and increasingly complicated riff structures (. But not until Heaven & Hell in 2007 did Iommi hear Sabbath achieve its full musical potential—culminating with the 2009 album The Devil You Know, an album Iommi stated compelled them to “represent the band at its best” ().
From Legendary Lineage to Modern Masterpiece
Heaven & Hell reunited Iommi, Butler, and Appice with Dio for the Dio Years—a creative high point on which radio and critics credited its hard-rocking but melodic gloss. Inspiration for The Devil You Know, Iommi reports, sparked up spontaneously while he finished a 2009 Japanese tour. Having gone out one night, he jokingly told the other musicians, “Do you fancy doing an album?
to Dio and the rest—and started writing days later .
Upon release, it greeted critical acclaim and respect by veterans and newcomers alike as metal fans. Critics complimented its dark mood and technicality—features that underlined Sabbath’s influence on creating subgenres (). As promised by Iommi, the songs were arranged more complexly, riffing more quickly, and more heavy in a mature manner, advancing Sabbath’s sound further.
Riffs That Roam
Iommi’s guitar work on The Devil You Know—particularly on tracks such as “Atom and Evil” and “Bible Black”—has been called “monstrous” and reminiscent of his doom-era traditional style . Dio’s voice, too, has been praised for its drama, heaping emotive vocals atop sonic thunder. This harmonizing, Iommi insists, allowed Sabbath to reach further than ever: “With Ronnie, we can do lots more musical things than we ever could with Ozzy” .
Above all, The Devil You Know has a lasting afterlife. It is routinely name-checked by newer bands in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and even big-name acts like Dave Grohl have expressed publicly their admiration for the Dio lineup .
Legacy and Reflection
Revisiting the album in 2025, the Far Out Magazine review confirmed Iommi’s position: The Devil You Know remains the ultimate testament to Sabbath’s musical brilliance. It “beyond their capabilities”—an era when the seasoned band wasn’t merely cashing in on past glories, but consciously reinterpreting their sound ().
No current tour or studio project is planned under the Heaven & Hell or Sabbath banner (as of Dio’s death in 2010), but The Devil You Know is the high point Sabbath would reach after Ozzy—a record that upheld the individual and group potential of the band even years into its own legend.
Where It Ranks Among Sabbath’s Legends
Despite Sabbath’s early string of classics—Black Sabbath (1970), Paranoid (1970), Vol. 4 (1972), and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973)—Iommi has never spoken highly enough of The Devil You Know as a creative rebirth. In his own words: “We had to try and represent the band at its best”. Critics have agreed: the album embodies both Sabbath’s classic doomy heft and modern speed and technical sophistication.
bottom‑line
More than forty years after Paranoid established the blueprint for heavy metal, The Devil You Know was Sabbath’s latter-day masterpiece—a statement of regeneration, proficiency, and ongoing viability. Tony Iommi’s assertion that the album is Sabbath “at its best” is not nostalgia—its verification by the band’s designer, and an appeal to new listeners to revisit one of metal’s finest periods.
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