Black Sabbath didn't just play heavy metal, they more or less invented it. Formed in Birmingham in 1968, the original four of Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, Bill Ward and Ozzy Osbourne took the bleakness of their industrial hometown and turned it into something genuinely new and genuinely heavy.
That sound is unmistakable: Iommi's down-tuned, doom-laden riffs, Butler's rumbling bass, and Ozzy's haunted wail sitting over the top. Tracks like "Paranoid," "Iron Man," "War Pigs" and "N.I.B." didn't just become metal staples, they wrote the rulebook every band that followed has been working from ever since.
The story got complicated after Ozzy departed in 1979. A run of singers passed through, most memorably Ronnie James Dio, along with Ian Gillan and Glenn Hughes, and the lineup kept shifting around its one constant: Iommi, the riff machine at the centre of it all, who never left.
Through every change, the band kept recording and kept touring, and their fingerprints are on just about every heavy band that came after. It's hard to overstate how much modern metal owes to them, which is exactly why they landed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006.
Few bands have earned their place on a t-shirt quite like this. Grab an officially licensed Black Sabbath tee from Teerex and wear a piece of the band that started it all.
