Black Sabbath’s 13 is widely known as the band’s final studio album. Released over ten years ago, the band did several press runs around it being their final album and embarked on a final world tour behind it. For twelve years it seemed that after a 50 year run the Heavy Metal progenitors were gone and dead. 

That was until now, the band recently announced they will be holding their final show in their hometown of Birmingham, England on July 5th and earlier this week held a press conference to go along with it. Despite the whole point of this conference being one final hurrah before the band finally says goodnight it seems that it has only opened more questions than it answered. According to Metal Injection, Tony Iommi shared a host of thoughts about the recording process of 13 including his misgivings about the way his lyricism panned out on the album, a desire to record something closer to the original demo versions as opposed to the final studio versions and a dissatisfaction with Rick Rubin’s production. 

Of course, this led fans to wonder if there’s any possibility of these demos reaching the light of day or possibly even an LP of new material. For his part, Iommi gave a maddeningly ambivalent answer saying “”I’ve been approached about doing a Sabbath album, it could be good, but I don’t want to take the time of sitting down and writing stuff like last time and it goes willy-nilly.” This entirely noncommittal sentiment was echoed by Geezer Butler and Bill Ward who both expressed that they would potentially be open to another album although Ward generally seemed much more enthusiastic about the prospect than Butler. 

All of this comes with the context that an album was originally planned to follow 13 which was eventually scrapped as well as the fact that Bill Ward was not included in the original recording process of the album for reasons that remain opaque. In short, it seems that a lot remains up in the air with the future of the band. Is there a possibility that a true final Sabbath album comes to pass? Is this just posturing and fanservice typical of a band of their stature? Who can say. All that’s clear is that July 5th is going to see one monster of a performance.