Black Sabbath’s Tony Martin-Era Box Set Coming This May

It’s been more than a year since its original announcement, but we now finally have some idea of when that fabled box set of Tony Martin-era Black Sabbath records will be released.

Over the course of a three minute clip posted on his official Facebook page (as transcribed by Blabbermouth), Iommi outlined a number of his projects from 2023 while looking forward to the coming year. While sharing his end-of-the-year remarks, 75-year-old riff master Tony Iommi revealed that the set will be available in May.

 ”Hello all, I hope you’ve had a great Christmas. We certainly have here. It’s been good fun. Plenty of food and drink. Marvelous, absolutely marvelous.

“Anyway, last year when I did my [year-end video] message, I did say we’d have a box set [of the Tony Martin-era Black Sabbath albums] coming out. Well, now I’ve been informed that it’ll be out in May. It’s been held up with paperwork and legal stuff. But anyway, it’s coming out in May now, if you’re interested, and I hope you are.”

In the rest of the clip, Iommi rattled off some of his other projects from 2023, including the Black Sabbath ballet that was done in conjunction with the Birmingham Royal Ballet, a documentary on Sky (that’s also on YouTube), and a track with Serj Tankian of System of a Down to raise money for Armenia, to name a few.

“So, we’ll see what happens now in the next year and I’ll inform you as we go on. But, yeah, I am writing and doing plenty of stuff and it’s sounding really good. I’m very happy with it. I might use some orchestration, I might not. So we’ll see how it goes.

“Anyway, have a great new year and all the best to you all.Thank you. Bye bye.”

At 75 years old and in remission with Non-Hodgkin lymphoma since August 2016, Iommi looks pretty damn good. Certainly better than his old bandmate Ozzy Osbourne.