It’s been a year of covers for Thou, who tackled Nirvana in a metal style for a Bandcamp fundraiser in June, reworked Bad Religion’s “Kerosense” into a blistering post-metal song for a Black Lives Matter compilation and conjured up blackened sludge influences during their take of Alice In Chains’ “Them Bones” for the Dirt (Redux) covers album. The band is now back with a new cover, tackling Black Sabbath’s “Wheels of Confusion” from their 1972 album Vol. 4.

This take on “Wheels Of Confusion” is aggressive, with ripping guitar chords and aggressively screamed vocals that push the energy of this track to the limit, which are greeted by cleaner vocals as the song progresses. The track goes out in an epic assortment of guitar solos, that channel the instrumental brilliance of the original.

“I think I was most excited about making that first section really heavy,” the band’s guitarist Andy Gibbs explained. “The Sabbath version doesn’t have a rhythm guitar track, and Iommi is playing that lead, so I thought that was a good chance to really lay into those root notes and pull all of the weight and emotion that we could out of the chord progression.”

Magnetic Eye Records will be releasing an all-covers album of Vol.4, like they previously did for Alice In Chains’ Dirt earlier this month and Pink Floyd’s The Wall back in 2018. The band teamed up with performer Emma Ruth Rundle back in September for their collaborative single “The Valley,” from their joint album May Our Chambers Be Full.