Best Black Sabbath Album Cover

Black Sabbath https://thehardtimes.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/st-2-400x400.jpg
Paranoid https://thehardtimes.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/para-400x400.jpg
Master of Reality https://thehardtimes.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/81oOdDIoGxL._UF10001000_QL80_-400x400.jpg
Volume 4 https://thehardtimes.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/vol-400x400.jpg
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath https://thehardtimes.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/sab-400x400.jpg
Sabatoge https://thehardtimes.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/sabota-400x400.jpg
Technical Ecstasy https://thehardtimes.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/tech-400x400.jpg
Never Say Die https://thehardtimes.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/never-400x400.jpg
Heaven and Hell https://thehardtimes.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/heav-400x400.jpg
Mob Rules https://thehardtimes.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/mob-400x400.jpg
Born Again
Seventh Star
Headless Cross
The Eternal Idol
TYR
Cross Purposes
Dehumanizer
Forbidden
13

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https://thehardtimes.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/headless-400x400.jpg
https://thehardtimes.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/eter-400x400.jpg
https://thehardtimes.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/tyr-400x400.jpg
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Good lord. Sorry for all the messy formatting.

The first is the only good one.

Nah Master of Reality and Volume 4 are completely iconic.

master of reality

Not Sabotage

As much as I love their music, I don’t think their album covers are that great. Master of Reality or Vol. 4 are the two I’d probably display on a wall in my house.

this should be the first one in a walk. agree that master and vol. 4 are iconic as well but they're just a slight bump below. of the newer ones i really like Headless Cross.

Heaven and Hell and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath are also decent

So tempted to vote Sabotage, in fact I think I might. Absolutely iconic fashion choices from the lads.

Voting Vol. 4

Surprised to see they never used the “henry” logo in an actual album cover, only comps.

A friend of mine has this magnet on his fridge - it’s a mix of vol. 4 and the henry logo - if it were an album cover it’d be my favorite one.

https://a.co/d/78w1g1X

Master of Reality

Technical Ecstasy or gtfo

sabotage and paranoid are my favs

Mob Rules painting totally freaked me out in the Brothers Hildebrant book I got in my Tolkien phase. Painted in 1974, so also metal before metal was well-defined!

Headless Cross is a classic case of 'the music doesn't live up to the sleeve'

Technical Ecstasy is probably my favourite (followed by Master of Reality). Never Say Die! is great as well - every Hipgnosis sleeve is.. so much a Hipgnosis sleeve. They're so much what they are, even when the band's Black Sabbath and the imagery between sleeves is unrelated. If that makes any sense.

Those angels sure made smoking look cool

Heaven and Hell looks like a White Lies or Editors or whoever album.

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath narrowly over H&H

that cover really freaked me out when I was 14

Vol 4 narrowly losing out to The Eternal Idol!

There are so many I like a lot, I'd love doing this as a full poll and roll-out.

SBS but kind of wanted to vote for Born Again

Never Say Die!, I’ve always loved it.

Either the first one or TE.

the color scheme of Born Again is really nice and different.

cover of 1984 >>> cover of H&H

voted master of reality

Black Sabbath: classic, eerie as fuck in a folk horror way
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath: instantly iconic, terrifying to small children
Technical Ecstasy: fantastically weird, also potentially terrifying to some children
Heaven And Hell: campy, snarky
Mob Rules: creepy and weird, awesome
Dehumanizer: pretty good in a comic-booky way

All the rest are either functional or awful (four words that could also describe Tony Martin's vocals, ha ha)

what i love about the first 6 albums from a covers perspective is that you can't really lock them down until sabotage, which... once you see that one and look back you think "so this is what drugs make people do!"

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath: instantly iconic, terrifying to small children
Technical Ecstasy: fantastically weird, also potentially terrifying to some children

Self titled: excellent, the cover photo + typeface is for me pure folk horror movie heaven

Paranoid - it’s great in a BBC scifi special effects way, like garbage bin monsters in Dr Who, doing a lot with a little & being wholly creative & memorable

Vol4 - instant tshirt, just fucking great

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath - i quietly hate the nazi S’s but the artwork is fucking superb

i think first album will get my vote

I posted this recently on the Heaven and Hell thread but why not, I'll post it here

https://www.vintageheavymetal.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Angels-Heaven-Hell-Black-Sabbath-Cover.jpg

The album's cover art was taken from a painting by artist Lynn Curlee, Smoking Angels, inspired by a 1928 photograph of women dressed as angels smoking backstage during a break at a college pageant.

Worth posting, for the record, the back cover of Sabotage. Shout out to Bill Ward's checkered y-fronts.

https://vinyl-records.nl/black-sabbath/photo-gallery/sabotage-usa/black%20sabbath%20sabotage%20usa%201581.jpg

Dismayed at the claims that any of the first five album covers are anything short of excellent. Voted s/t

Paranoid would have worked better as an album cover for Attila.

Ozzy looks great on the cover of Sabotage, Bill, er, not so much.

Perfect: Black Sabbath

Good: Never Say Die!

Good but doesn't suit them: Technical Ecstacy

Fine: Vol 4, Sabotage, Heaven and Hell, Headless Cross

Bit crap: Paranoid, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Mob Rules, Born Again, 13

Terrible: The rest

i think i will vote for mob rules, i think that cover is cool af

it's a little cooler than the robots having sex imo

sabotage cover is so silly that i do sort of adore it

Master of Reality is absolutely one of the most iconic of all time, imo.

especially with the original embossed writing

Black Sabbath - Haunting
Paranoid - Hilarious in every way possible
Master of Reality - A lot of people identify with this cover, but I don't
Vol 4. - Rules
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath - My favorite. Cool Facebook post on an unofficial Drew Struzan page, with background material: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19jzDPwCGx/
Sabotage - Very cool.
Technical Ecstacy - Wrong band.
Never Say Die - Black Oyster Cult is the vibe I get
Heaven & Hell - Yawn
Mob Rules - I love this one also. The first Black Sabbath cover I ever saw, when I was like 10 years old. Terrifying!

Don't care about the rest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sabbath_(album)#Artwork

The cover photograph was shot at Mapledurham Watermill, situated on the River Thames in Oxfordshire, England, by photographer Keith McMillan (credited as Keef), who was in charge of the overall design. Standing in front of the watermill is a figure dressed in a black cloak, portrayed by model Louisa Livingstone, whose identity was not widely known until 2020.[23] "I'm sure (McMillan) said it was for Black Sabbath, but I don't know if that meant anything much to me at the time," Livingstone recalled, adding that it had been "freezing cold" during the shoot. "I had to get up at about 4 o'clock in the morning. Keith was rushing around with dry ice, throwing it into the water. It didn't seem to be working very well, so he ended up using a smoke machine," she said.[24]

Here's a new track by her music project! Somehow I quite like it.

https://indreba.bandcamp.com/track/anthem-to-truth-see-more-oh-yeah

I think they took a bunch of photos at Mapledurham for a number of Vertigo albums, I'm sure the Affinity was from there too.

(It's just up the road from me)

Re Sabotage cover:

Quote from Bill in Martin Popoff’s ‘Doom Let Loose: An Illustrated History of Black Sabbath”

..”Working on that was fun except for one thing," adds Bill. "Graham and I forgot to let the guys know what to wear, so when we showed up for the shoot, it was a total fucking disaster.
That's why we ended up with this very odd looking Black Sabbath. But I love the idea of the mirror. But we just came in and we hadn't focused on wardrobe or anything, which was important. So in that particular shot, you'll notice that Ozzy's wearing a long cloak. Well, he has no underpants on. I'm wearing his under-pants, his checkered underpants. Because when we showed up for the session, I didn't have any underpants. I borrowed the red tights from my wife, Mysti, who was at the shoot. So I had a pair of my wife's red tights on, Ozzy's underpants and my black leather jacket which was with me for years. I think Tony looks like hes just come from the office. I think the shot's hilarious to be honest with you.”

themoreyouknow.gif

also get you a best friend who will give you their underpants. (and/or whose worn underpants you would wear)

Master of Reality is absolutely one of the most iconic of all time, imo.

― afriendlypioneer, Tuesday, July 29, 2025 10:29 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

every time i see this album cover i think about all the joints that have been rolled on top of it through time

Vol 4. Black background plus yellow Ozzy peace sign graphic is so powerful. I can't stress enough how important YELLOW is to its impact. And Gadget is a perfect slightly edgy 70s typeface.

Also shout out to Seventh Star. Tony standing in the desert at sunset in a fringe leather jacket looking so sexy, straight out of an 80s perfume or cigarette ad.

yeah, my interpretation was that he threw on his wife's tights, but when he got to the photo shoot they realized they were too revealing, so he borrowed ozzy's underwear to cover up his pee pee? idk tbh it's a weird story

like you can see the checkered underwear through the tights. god, the stinky dirty jeans thing is so hilarious. they were proto-metal in more than one way for sure

Who would have been better suited to the TE cover? I vote for The Alan Parsons Project

UFO

Really happy with all of the directions this thread has taken

The underwear wasn't checkered when it was bought

The underwear had a chequered history

They also had a checkered future, as they would inspire the cover art for the debut album by Fastway, formed by bassist Pete Way, formerly of...UFO. And that's the rest of the story. Good day!

Who would have been better suited to the TE cover? I vote for The Alan Parsons Project

― Maresn3st, Wednesday, 30 July 2025 16:29 (one hour ago)

Late 70s era Hawkwind

Yeah tbh I had wondered about the technicalities of Bill’s pants story myself - so glad we could solve this together lol. Thread delivers!

Bill has all kinds of weird/sad/offhand stories. Like he tells one in the Popoff book about sleeping on Geezer’s ~front lawn~ after he brokeup with his girlfriend. For at least a couple of nights I think? Like not passing out but literally crashing … on the lawn. He didn’t have anywhere to live but didn’t want to impose on Geezer?
Also I think Bill was such a nightmare by then that Geezer was loathe to let him in the house (perhaps fair)
**A lot of these stories obviously cross reference to Bill’s well and truly out-of-control alcoholism but there’s this layer of eccentrism with him as well

These drummers are a crazy lot. Can you imagine a party with Bill Ward, Bonzo and Keith Moon? And Neil Peart in the corner reading a book, and Charlie Watts going around making sure everybody's using a coaster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr-puXiUMvE

Beard? Check
Bandanna headband? Check
Reflective aviators? Check
1976 was a hell of a year

These drummers are a crazy lot. Can you imagine a party with Bill Ward, Bonzo and Keith Moon? And Neil Peart in the corner reading a book, and Charlie Watts going around making sure everybody's using a coaster.

https://i.postimg.cc/QtWRXZsF/IMG-3241.webp

Ringo was at every party in the 70s.

I studied the debut cover in my junior high library 10 years before I heard the record, wondering why you would call a song "A Bit of Finger", and really the whole atmosphere of music and visual is perfectly congruent.

An honourable mention for my 80s copy of Master of Reality, after they stopped embossing the title but before colouring it grey, so "Black Sabbath" floats over a void - nearly as funny as my copy of Roxy Music's Country Life whose cover depicts a couple of evergreens.

'sabotage'...the outfits are so weird and perfect

Imagine how genuinely stupid this would look with four guys all clad in leather and studs.

Am I the only person who unironically likes the cover of Paranoid? I always processed it as an abstraction of shapes and colors before I clocked just how goofy that dude's costume is.

i love it too!!

I know they originally wanted to call the record "War Pigs" but that dude (other then I guess being a warrior?) doesn't make me think "War Pigs" and instead the way his seems to be jumping out from behind a tree and the photo effects around him has always made me think of "paranoia", as in "they are coming to get me!" They album title & cover made perfect sense to me at 14 and still does at 49.

That’s how i’ve always seen it. I mentally link it with a Tom Hanks movie I saw as a kid, Mazes and Monsters, about college kids driven mad by role-playing games.

absolutely love it and agree that the image and title are a great match

that dude doesn't make me think "War Pigs"

He dressed his assistant, Roger Brown, in pink and yellow garb, wielding a sword and shield, and sporting a motorcycle helmet. Shots were also made with Brown donning a pig mask, but deemed a little too on the nose with no surviving archive of the scrapped swine snaps.

lol RIP “scrapped swine snaps”

he really should have worn those tights for the final show. at least he took his shirt off.

never say die you bastards

thread needs bill magill

but we all know he and ade killed each other in a fistfight outside a falcons game 12-15 years ago

he delurked for the Sabbath reunion show talk!

omg

will Bill Magill be summoned if i announce to the thread that i discovered last night that i fuckin LOVE Dehumanizer

I don't love the whole album but "I" fucking destroys.

It sure does

Is ear on the wall an outtake from that album? It also destroys

guys can I just say how much i love talking abt Sabbath itt and the myriad other threads? it’s been very therapeutic imo

honestly ozz’s death hit me harder than i expected & has stayed with me far longer than other folk - i think seeing him at the Back to the Beginning show & all the great performances there unearthed all my oddly dormant Sabbath/Ozzy fandom again idk

i think mr veg is waiting for my obsession to hibernate again lol. “again with this?”

No hibernation! Early days yet!

oddly dormant Sabbath/Ozzy fandom

Mine too, or rather, it was never fully activated 'til now. I got a ways into friendship with the first three albums long ago, sampled others, and was utterly ignorant of anything post-1978, other than Crazy Train, Killer of Giants, and the Down to Earth record. It was always one of those "someday, properly" fanhoods. I never expected to be falling all over even the so-called minor records. (First listen to Seventh Star today, SO GOOD, what the hell! The title track is all-time!)

I remember reading a review of a turn-of-the-century Jethro Tull show, in which the writer was saying Ian Anderson's voice obviously wasn't what it used to be, and nor was the line-up anywhere near as proficient as the Clive Bunker or Barriemore Barlow Tulls, BUT anytime Ian played the flute or Martin played guitar, the writer's face would melt straight off.

Tony Iommi is having that effect on me right now. It can be riffs, it can be solos, it can just be him playing rhythm guitar, but fuuuuuck. That tone, that melodic sensibility, that ATTACK.

So my updated "favorite guitarists" list is now probably:

1. Shigeru Suzuki (possibly unshakeable, if only because he spent the years he cared most about guitar under Haruomi Hosono's wing)
2. Tony Iommi
3. Colleen Kinsella
4. John Frusciante
5. Neil Young

Somethin' like that.

Point is: IOMMI IS GOD

Awww man, The Devil You Know. Second listen much better than the first. Gloom gloom gloom gloom gloom gloom gloom gloom

<3

I spent my first 20 years on earth believing that Sabbath ceased to be once Ozzy went solo

Then Mr Veg introduced me to Dio Sabbath and I was like whaaat

But even then I never explored past Mob Rules. Tony Martin whomst? Ian Gillan whatnow? Dio AGAIN?
So learning about the long looooooooong tail of Sabbath under Iommi now that I’m of an age to understand a lot more of the context is really fun and pretty fascinating.

Back on topic re covers: The Forbidden album cover has got to be one of the worst. YUK.

And Tyr is kindof cool at first but after you stare at it a while it looks like a Norse Mythology powerpoint presentation

So learning about the long looooooooong tail of Sabbath under Iommi now that I’m of an age to understand a lot more of the context is really fun and pretty fascinating.

I'm having tons of fun *grabbing* the band by the tail. I've yet to experience my first listens to everything between Vol 4 and Born Again, inclusive! Dehumanizer (and Cross Purposes) and 13 too!

I like the look of the Grim Reaper on the cover of Forbidden, less keen on what he's up to.

Oh except I did play Sabbath Bloody Sabbath in full the other day, but it was too regal, the glory was more than I could handle, all I could do was retreat back to that more manageable tailtip. Vol 4 and Sabotage will be the last of the 20 that I play!

Awww man, The Devil You Know. Second listen much better than the first. Gloom gloom gloom gloom gloom gloom gloom gloom

It's such a dark record. Dio was usually all about the power and the glory, but he really went for a kind of existential terror on that album. I love it so much, and I'm so glad I got to see them tour it.

If nothing else, Never Say Die! should win the Best Black Sabbath Inner Sleeve Artwork poll, for the blueprint drawings of the jet fighter suit and some kind of armature.

The album title emblazoned on the cover and the look on Bill Ward's face, makes Sabotage seem so arch. "Oh, we know EXACTLY what we're doing." Raised eyebrow, raised eyebrow. They even put Bill front & center. And then there's the way his red tights blending in with his reflected red tights make his left leg look so large.

Record covers where an early 70s artist goes late 70s in a big way.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d5/Black-Sabbath-Technical-Ecstasy.jpg

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Sabotage & Technical Ecstasy voters, I salute your boldness

That's a tragic showing for Bill's Tights, I stand by my vote

but you raised awareness & that’s the first crucial step

can't remember what i voted for. i think they're all great through Born Again, and then Headless Cross and Dehumanizer are the highlights of the later ones

13 could've been good if they hadn't used that horrible filter and a different typeface

xpost idk i kind of hate Dehumanizer cover