SLIPKNOT’s COREY TAYLOR Explains Why He Keeps Returning to a 1970 BLACK SABBATH Track That Still Terrifies Him
Summary
- Corey Taylor says the song Black Sabbath is one of the scariest he’s ever heard, he still listens to it to ‘go someplace mentally’.
- The Slipknot frontman credits Black Sabbath for giving bands like his the ‘blueprint’ for heavy music.
- The comments come ahead of Sabbath’s final concert in Birmingham, marking the end of a legendary run.
Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor still remembers the chill he got the first time he heard Black Sabbath, the song, not just the band.
In a recent interview with the BBC, Taylor shared how deeply the track affected him.
“It’s one of the scariest songs I ever heard,” he said.
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The self-titled song opens with a church bell and rain sounds, followed by slow, heavy guitar riffs and Ozzy Osbourne’s haunting voice. That mix hit Taylor hard when he first heard it.
“The mystique was in the lyrics. It was in the sound. Everything was just a little darker,” he explained. “Sabbath gave us the blueprint. They gave us the recipe. They gave us the cookbook, man.”
Taylor said that when he wants to get into a certain mental zone, he plays Black Sabbath.
“I go back to the beginning,” he said.
The band’s first album, also called Black Sabbath, came out on February 13, 1970. The record is often seen as the launch point for heavy metal as a genre.
Sabbath’s final concert is scheduled for July 5 in their hometown of Birmingham, England, where their story began.
Many musicians have shared how much the band influenced them. Taylor’s comments are part of a larger tribute featured in the BBC Radio WM documentary Forging Metal.
Other artists, including Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale, also credited Sabbath with shaping their music careers.
Taylor tied Sabbath’s sound to their roots in Birmingham’s industrial past.
“You are where you come from,” he said. “One hundred percent Iowa is the reason why Slipknot was Slipknot, and the Midlands are absolutely the reason Sabbath was Sabbath.”
As Sabbath closes out their career, their influence continues to show up in new bands and modern metal scenes around the world.
Why the Song ‘Black Sabbath’ Still Feels So Creepy Decades Later
Even 50 years after its release, Black Sabbath still makes people uneasy, and that’s kind of the point.
The track was the opener on the band’s debut album, and it didn’t sound like anything else in 1970. The song starts with a slow tolling bell and rain, then drops into a heavy, three-note guitar riff that feels more like a warning than a melody.
Ozzy Osbourne’s vocals don’t help calm things down. His delivery is slow, almost like a chant, with lyrics about seeing a dark figure and feeling overwhelmed by fear.
It wasn’t just shock value. The band was pulling from real-life experiences. Guitarist Tony Iommi had recently lost two fingertips in a factory accident and had to create homemade prosthetics to keep playing.
The band was also shaped by post-war Birmingham, a city full of steel plants and bomb craters. The music reflected that environment, loud, gritty, and a little eerie.
Even today, it holds up. You don’t need to crank the volume to feel unsettled. The track moves at its own pace, building tension instead of going for speed or noise.
For younger fans discovering Black Sabbath through bands like Slipknot or Mastodon, the original still packs a punch. It’s slow, but never boring. It’s simple, but never soft.
That’s probably why Corey Taylor keeps going back to it. Even with all the chaos he’s known for in Slipknot, it’s this six-minute song from 1970 that continues to mess with his head.
And he’s not alone.
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