Tony Iommi Shares “Over the Violent Sun” From New Solo Album From the Dark

“Over the Violent Sun” opens Tony Iommi’s new solo album From the Dark, and it does the work an opener should: it establishes a register and holds it. The register is gothic American power metal, the strain that fuses doom’s pacing and atmosphere with the scale of traditional heavy metal. Iommi did as much as anyone to build that form, and he spent most of the Eighties and all of the Nineties pushing Black Sabbath through it.

Jørn Lande takes the vocal. He is a singer in the Ronnie James Dio lineage, which is not a small thing to invoke on an Iommi record, and the pairing is the reason the track lands. Lande carries the melodrama without tipping it into pastiche; Iommi gives him room and then answers him with riffs.

The song builds toward a closing crescendo that cuts off rather than resolves. That abruptness is deliberate, and it makes the album’s remaining material feel like a promise rather than a footnote. From the Dark sits closer to the Tony Martin era of Sabbath than to the band’s earliest records, which is a useful way to hear it: not a reunion in all but name, but a guitarist working a vein he never abandoned.

At this stage of a career, the question is never whether Iommi can still write these riffs. It is whether the context around them earns them. On this track, it does.