10 Rock Albums That Were Ahead Of Their Time

For everyone that worships at the alter of Black Sabbath for starting heavy metal, none of the band members really saw it that way. While Tony Iommi definitely had a taste for the darker side of rock and roll when he was first writing his classic licks, he had always felt that the band was closer to hard rock and the blues most of the time instead of a traditional metal band. By the time they reached Master of Reality, they had another genre to notch on their belt: stoner rock.

Even with Sabbath's penchant for writing longer songs and having riffs that went on for eternity, the songs on this record were the first taste of what stoner rock would sound like in the next few decades, taking the most savage riffs you can think of and turning them into tracks that were bound to be amazing when you were blazed. As if the wink and nod wasn't enough, the start of the album with Iommi coughing on the song Sweet Lead is enough to seal the deal for the Sleep fans looking to do some digging.

There's a lot more that has to be said on this record besides the drug connotations though, with songs like Children of the Grave putting the final nail in the coffin for the hippy generation, as well as Into the Void, which might have one of the most evil sounding riffs that Iommi would ever put to tape. This might have been just the natural progression for Sabbath after Paranoid, but what they left in their wake here was a competition to see who could get heavier than them.