Metal
BMG · 23 October 2026
From the Dark started out as an instrumental record — Iommi had four or five tracks down with no vocals — and has ended up with one singer and one drummer for everything. Jørn Lande tells it: they called him in for “maybe a song or two”, he cut “Beyond the Dead”, then “Stormwatcher”, and after those two Iommi decided there would be no other voices. Lande shares the writing credits on all eight tracks with the guitarist, and in the shops the album isn’t under Iommi’s name alone: it is filed as “Tony Iommi & Jorn”.
The rest is Becky Baldwin on bass and Karl Brazil on drums, with producer Mike Exeter, who co-produces with Iommi and plays the keyboards. Baldwin got in through a video: Exeter had been following the bass covers she posted and played Iommi her version of “Children of the Sea”, from Heaven and Hell (1980), and the invitation to the studio came out of that, for one song. They asked her for the whole album. Iommi sums it up by saying he could have gone and picked “some named people”, but that he has done that already.
Only one guest survives from the original idea, and he appears on a single track: Brian May plays a solo on “Death Wake” and that is all. Iommi offered him more and he turned it down. “No, no. Your solos are good. I don’t need to play”, he said, and cut his part at Iommi’s own home studio, with the guitarist playing him a couple of things on the spot.
The thirty-two-page CD mediabook adds two songs, “Scent of Dark” and an extended version of “Deified”, and Iommi had already released both as standalone singles: “Deified” came out on 26 July 2024, two years before the album was announced. So the edition sold as the complete one contains nothing that has not been on sale for a while, and the two songs with which Iommi reappeared under his own name, “Scent of Dark” in 2021 and “Deified” in 2024, have no place on the 45rpm double LP (sold in four colours) or on the digital version. This is his fourth solo album, and it arrives twenty-one years after Fused.
Rating: 7.9/10
Text by Roger Estivill