Roadrunner Records is honoured to announce the worldwide signing (ex-North America, Japan, & Asia) of the highly respected, legendary group Heaven & Hell. The label is proud to include Heaven & Hell in their celebrated roster of bands at the top of their game.
Heaven & Hell
Heavy metal icons Ronnie James Dio, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Vinny Appice are set to release a brand new album - their first under the moniker Heaven & Hell, with Black Sabbath's last studio album having been 17 YEARS AGO – on April 27. Titled The Devil You Know, this is an event for every classic rock and metal fan to get excited about!
After finishing several heralded world tours as Heaven & Hell last summer, the influential band were tighter than ever before, both musically and personally. Agreeing that it would be a shame to stop making music together at tour’s end, the quartet began writing, first in England at Iommi’s home studio and later in Los Angeles at Dio’s studio. “The band had gotten too good to just walk away,” Dio says.
“We wanted to show people that we were still capable of giving them new music that measured up to what we’d done in the past.” With that goal in mind, the band once again converged on Rockfield Studios in Wales last winter, the same place they used 17 years earlier to record their last album, Dehumanizer. The result is the long awaited new album The Devil You Know, featuring 10 soon-to-be-classic tracks from the Dio-fronted version of Black Sabbath.
Bible Black, the epic first single, begins with Iommi on acoustic guitar behind Dio’s plaintive wail before the rhythm shifts to a menacing stomp for the rest of this dark tale about a book of sinister scriptures. One of the first songs written for the album, Dio says it established a tone for the rest of the album. “When you start off with a blockbuster like that, it makes the rest of the album so much easier because it gives you a benchmark to measure the other songs against.”
Iommi proves he hasn’t lost the ability to inspire six-string envy, unleashing riffs like a pack of rabid hellhounds on Atom And Evil, Fear, Neverwhere, and Eating The Cannibals, a tune about doing more than biting the hand that feeds. Butler and Appice slow the pace while ramping up the intensity on Follow The Tears and Double The Pain and Breaking Into Heaven, the latter diverging from its glacial procession for Dio’s majestic chorus about fallen angels planning an attack on paradise.
When the songs were finished, Dio says he, Iommi and Butler marveled at their own brutal efficiency. “We almost felt guilty to tell you the truth. We looked at each other at one point and said: ‘Is it really done? I can’t do it any better. Can you? No. Then I guess were done’,” he recalls laughing. “At the end of the day, I think what separates this band is that we know who we are. We want to do one thing well and not try to be something we’re not.”