{"id":913979,"date":"2026-10-02T22:50:13","date_gmt":"2026-10-02T22:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/913979\/"},"modified":"2026-10-02T22:50:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T22:50:13","slug":"heavy-song-of-the-week-tony-iommis-stormwatcher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/913979\/","title":{"rendered":"Heavy Song of the Week: Tony Iommi’s “Stormwatcher”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Heavy Song of the Week<\/a> is a feature on Heavy Consequence breaking down the top metal, punk, and hard rock tracks you need to hear every Friday. This week, we highlight the new single \u201cStormwatcher\u201d from Tony Iommi.<\/p>\n

An interesting historical and critical question is when precisely did heavy metal begin? The minute you know to look for it, traces of it appear all over the place, from blues to early psychedelic rock to proto-prog to the more theatrical and dark rock and roll acts of the \u201950s.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting, in part, because the credited founders Black Sabbath and especially the riff lord himself<\/a> Tony Iommi have almost transcended time in a sense. It feels thinking of him less like contemplating a mortal man but instead a god walking amongst us, so great his only real peers become people like Miles Davis or Prince for how much came out of him.<\/p>\n

Related Video<\/p>\n

\u201cStormwatcher\u201d is both an affirmation of that legacy, proof that he can pull out true heavy metal magic with seemingly anyone, as well as an affirmation of his ear as a band leader. Iommi, despite his lordly presence, chooses not to overshadow the rest of the band. They swing in unity, calling to mind the underrated releases of \u201980s Sabbath like Born Again or the Tony Martin era. Jorn Lande in particular sounds incredible; it\u2019s hard not to fantasize about an era that could rival Dio\u2019s magical body of work with Iommi. The loss of Ozzy makes it ever more important we honor these gods of heavy metal while they are still around. Long live heavy metal.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Honorable Mentions<\/p>\n

Slash Featuring Myles Kennedy and The Conspirators \u2013 \u201cFlying Blind\u201d<\/p>\n

Everything about this project seems to exist to prove me gloriously wrong. Slash shows enormous range when paired with Myles Kennedy, who is easily the most consistently great force in contemporary mainstream rock. This track fits in the art rock darkness of Alice in Chains against some wonderful adventurous guitarwork from Slash including a killer diminished run. Add on Kennedy\u2019s voice, which is so good so often I believe he could sing me the phone book and make it an album of the year contender, and you have a cut that more than justifies the esteem these two have built for themselves over the past decades. That the continue to release work that stands comfortably amongst their acclaimed catalogs is nothing to sniff at either. It\u2019s that perpetual conviction that makes them so good so often and \u201cFlying Blind\u201d shows we shouldn\u2019t anticipate them losing that anytime soon.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Steven Wilson \u2013 \u201cOn Chapel Slope\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOn Chapel Slope\u201d begins to give a better sense of the shape of Steven Wilson\u2019s upcoming solo album\u00a0Requiem for a Village. It contains musical elements such as the post-Japan David Sylvianisms of his solo debut\u00a0Insurgentes alongside the more decrepit songwriting that feels almost like it\u2019s crumbling around you from Grace for Drowning. Add in to this the particularly British eerie not-quite-horror atmospheres from his album The Raven That Refused to Sing and Other Stories and you get a great picture not only of this track but the overall project. It\u2019s the musical equivalent of walking through a ghost town where you can sense eyes watching you from the windows but never seem to see a soul, at once pastoral and beautiful with that undercurrent of looming dread. This kind of ghost-haunted beauty is what he excels at and it\u2019s wonderful to see him ensconced in it again.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Wolves in the Throne Room \u2013 \u201cEstuary\u201d<\/p>\n

Wolves in the Throne Room has always felt magical, like a portal to another world. Heavy metal can be music of the spirit, rife with occult portent and pagan offering, as much as it can be about thrashing it out to loud guitars. \u201cEstuary,\u201d the title track of their upcoming soft concept album about the world after the fall of man, retains that same magic. Describing the song musically does little to convey its power: How could learning about the mid-tempo grooves, the blastbeats, and the killer melodicism communicate the other, more important aspect of this song? This is music, like Pink Floyd and the Cure before them, to put on before you lay back with eyes closed and allow yourself to enter it as if you are astral projecting. Sheeting water, obdurate stone, the sentinel eye of the moon peering at you through treetops. It is a passage to another world, as truly great black metal should be.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Heavy Song of the Week is a feature on Heavy Consequence breaking down the top metal, punk, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":913980,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,134,136],"class_list":["post-913979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=913979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/913980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=913979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=913979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=913979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}