Black Sabbath has released the first single off their upcoming album ‘13’, the first one in more than 35 years, and the new song is a 9-minute-long druggy-sludgy homage to…. Nietzsche? Entitled ‘God is Dead’ the song goes on and on, stretching and throbbing with Ozzy asking the existentialist question ‘Is God dead?… 'Is God really dead?’, while rising up from his tomb, and wandering for a very long time in a doomed-poetry landscape filled with rivers of evil, dying land and bloody rain. The epic tune is rather slow but has a few of these almost Pink Floyd-esque sonic explosions, but overall Black Sabbath doesn’t escape much from their familiar dark territory and rocks till the end with ‘God is dead/God is dead’ in repeat.
Nevertheless, Ozzy hasn’t exactly found the answer to the question, and that disappointed me! Come on Ozzy Osborne, 9 minutes of this and still a question mark? Then, he admits in the very last verse, ‘I don’t believe that God is dead’,… Well, did you read Nietzsche? He was pretty clear about it!
The song also features Rage Against the Machine’s Brad Wilk on drums and producer Rick Rubin, and despite the fact that the recording below has this annoying iHeartRadio audio signals every minute or so, you can have nevertheless a pretty good idea of the song.