Tony Iommi has released a new single entitled “Scent of Dark”. This song marks four years since the guitarist’s last musical endeavour, and his first commercial musical release in eight years. You can listen to the track down below.
Iommi, perhaps best known as the guitarist of heavy metal pioneers Black Sabbath, has explored musical ventures outside of the group, having released a self-titled solo album in 2000, and collaborated with fellow Black Sabbath bandmates Geezer Butler and Bill Ward, as well as ex-Black Sabbath and Rainbow singer Ronnie James Dio in the group Heaven and Hell.
In 2017, Iommi composed a five-minute piece of classical-tinged music for the Birmingham Cathedral Choir, entitled “How Good It Is.” The piece can be found on YouTube, and on Birmingham Cathedral’s website. According to their website, Iommi’s incentive to compose the piece was to “give something back to his home city.”
Other than this, the guitarist’s last commercial music release was Black Sabbath’s nineteenth full-length studio album 13, which was released on June 10th, 2013. The album received generally favourable reviews upon its release, with some particularly glowing reception from Fred Thomas of Allmusic, who called the album “unexpectedly brilliant, apocalyptic, and essential for any die-hard metal fan.” There has been talk over the last few years of a potential twentieth album from Black Sabbath, however nothing has been set in stone.
“Scent of Dark” shares a name with a line of perfume that Iommi has recently released, in collaboration with Sergio Momo, the founder of Italian perfume brand Xerjoff. Momo himself features on the track, playing guitar alongside Iommi. According to Revolver, Iommi gave an insight into how the track was written, saying; “I’ve had the riff for quite a while and I’d never done anything with it…but it gave us a base to start from. We built up the track with programmed drums at first and then Mike Exeter demoed bass and keyboards on it, and I added my guitar solos, just to give us an idea of how it was going to sound…Then we added the strings. I’d worked with string sections on Sabbath albums before, but this was a whole new experience.”
It may come as a surprise to some that Iommi has ventured into the world of perfumes and colognes, however he also told Revolver; “It’s something I’ve always been interested in, ever since the early days of products like Brut and Old Spice, which I’d always get given for Christmas…Once I started touring the world with Sabbath though, I started discovering different sorts of fragrances from other countries and began collecting them.”
