15 Greatest Hard Rock Albums You Need To Hear Before You Die
4. Paranoid - Black Sabbath
When you start thinking of the great figures in music history, Black Sabbath are almost a no-brainer for any self-respecting hard rocker. The band's sound was so heavy for its time that many of the band's predecessors took the Sabbath mold and turned it into what became known as heavy metal.
That's not the way the band members saw it though. From their point of view, they were just another hard rock band who happened to have a more devilish twist on the music, and you can hear that raw hard rock in spades on Paranoid. Front to back, this record never sticks to any traditional song structure but instead builds the songs on some of the greatest riffs ever conceived by man. To this day, no guitarist can match the ominous sound of Tony Iommi's guitar, which absolutely screams for mercy across tracks like "War Pigs" or the absolute mind-melter "Electric Funeral."
Even when pressed to make a hit single, the title track became one of the first heavy metal tracks to cross over into the mainstream. In an industry where they seemed destined to fail, Sabbath took all of their sonic dread and channeled it into glorious hymns of doom. The goal was to make a good rock album, but the end result kickstarted an entire genre shift.