Heavy Song of the Week: Tony Iommi Delivers Mournful Thunder with “Over the Violent Sun”

Heavy Song of the Week is a feature on Heavy Consequence breaking down the top metal, punk, and hard rock tracks you need to hear every Friday. This week, we highlight the new single “Over the Violent Sun” from Tony Iommi.

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We try not to overly stack Heavy Song of the Week winners from the same album. The idea is simple: This forum acts not just as a compendium of the week’s best heavy tracks but also as a platform to highlight as much of that wide musical world which seems to effortlessly to remain a bounty. Black Sabbath legend Tony Iommi is different though. He is the lord of heavy metal, the crafter of the riffs that forged the genre proper. The loss of Ozzy last year taught us, if anything, that we must honor these figures while they still live, especially when they still fire at the caliber presented on “Over the Violent Sun,” the opening track from Iommi’s new solo album From the Dark.

“Over the Violent Sun,” one of From the Dark‘s best cuts, sets the stage for the album to come by indulging into the gothic take on US power metal to which Iommi was so foundational. That form of power metal fused doom metal pacing and atmospherics with the epic majesty of traditional heavy metal, producing something that felt Wagnerian and tragic even in its triumph, that a stature of a weeping knight.

The combination of Iommi (who knows how to create this music with his eyes closed and spent most of the ’80s and all of the ’90s steering Black Sabbath toward it) and Jørn Lande (who is an incredible metal vocalist, and an honorable heir to Ronnie James Dio) is utter magic. That this album builds to its monumental closing crescendo before the sudden cut makes your heart eager for more. But it also underscores that From the Dark is a new Black Sabbath album in all but name, the true inheritor to Tony Martin’s swan song Forbidden. “Over the Violent Sun” is our Heavy Song of the Week.

Honorable Mentions

Assumption – “Paradox of the Arrow”

Assumption makes doom that feels like how the cover of Thergothon’s classic Stream from the Heavens looks. The melodic and chordal information sheets down like slate grey rain in the manner closer to post-metal than death-doom. The winding melodies feel more like the frantic darting of small figures trapped in labyrinths. Monumental architectural and megalophobia are common aspects of heavy metal of this kind, with the stillness of the compositions combined with their length meant to evoke the kind of cold terror you’d feel staring at a seemingly infinite wall. That Assumption are Italian, placed within the mouth of antiquity, seems only to deepen their commitment to this cause, with their music feeling like being suffocated by historical marble and stone choking out the future.

Dischordia – “The Path of the Hunter”

Dischordia sound like if you were to slowly melt a death metal band to reveal the rigid steel of an industrial metal band beneath. The upper layer of their sound is made of the fundamentals of death metal: low-tuned riffs, lower gurgled vocals, and meat behind the hand. The innermost aspect of their sound is a cold and mechanical approach caught somewhere between Car Bomb and Fear Factory. It’s the middle space between those two where all the brilliant excitement comes, with bizarre atonal runs and passages that feel almost like carnival music, djent, or Pink Floyd depending on where in the song you are merging those two aspects with a psychedelic flesh. It’s mad chaos, the kind you can seemingly only find in heavy metal, the kind that makes this genre so intoxicating to we adherrants.

Temple of Void – “Godless Cynic”

Somehow merging the coldness of the opening riff of Death’s “Flattening of Emotions” from Human with the maniacal alien sensation of Voivod, Temple of Void deliver a track that feels like its emerged from the cold expanses of outer space with “Godless Cynic.” There’s something nearly post-punk in its arrangement, with chord stabs that feel like something out of a post-hardcore record. Their work here indicates once again the almost limitless expanses of death metal and its ability to incorporate ideas from all over the board while still feeling ultimately like death metal and nothing else. Death metal is, among many things, music of joy within alienation, and the sound Temple of Void conjures here is a perfect example, warm with power but chilled by isolation.