Vol. 4

The first album not produced by Rodger Bain. Black Sabbath and Patrick Meehan are credited as producers, but Iommi did the bulk of the work and Meehan was barely involved. Colin Caldwell and Vic Smith engineered at the Record Plant in Los Angeles in May and June 1972. The band rented a mansion in Bel Air, and heavy cocaine use shaped the sessions. The working title was Snowblind, which the label changed to Vol. 4.

Changes is a piano ballad. Iommi learned piano at the mansion, and Osbourne has said Butler's lyric is about the break-up of Ward's marriage. Laguna Sunrise was written after watching a sunrise at Laguna Beach and has an orchestra. FX grew from Iommi's neck crucifix hitting the guitar strings, and he called it a total joke. In 1975 Iommi said the record was such a complete change that they felt they had jumped an album.

It reached number 13 in the United States and number 1 in Australia. Lester Bangs praised it in Creem. Mojo said in 2013 that if booze and dope fuelled the earlier albums, Vol. 4 is their cocaine. Rolling Stone put it 14th in its 2017 list of metal albums, and Q ranked it 60th among the 100 greatest British albums in 2000. Sleep and Pantera each imitated its cover. A Super Deluxe edition in 2021 added live recordings from the Rainbow Theatre in London on 16 March 1973 and from Hardrock in Manchester on 11 March 1973.

Writing in Pitchfork in 2021, Sean T. Collins called it a close second to Paranoid and said Iommi claimed to have had cocaine flown in on a private plane. He heard the riff of Snowblind as close to the opener Wheels of Confusion, and noted two songs with notable second lives: Supernaut, reworked by 1,000 Homo DJs, a Ministry side project, and Changes, covered by the soul singer Charles Bradley as a lament for his mother.