Mob Rules (album)
1981 studio album by Black Sabbath
Mob Rules is the tenth studio album by the English heavy metal band Black Sabbath, released on 4 November 1981. It followed 1980's Heaven and Hell, and was the second album to feature lead singer Ronnie James Dio and the first with drummer Vinny Appice. Neither musician would appear on a Black Sabbath studio album again until the 1992 album Dehumanizer.
Produced and engineered by Martin Birch, the album received a remastered Deluxe Edition release in 2010 and an expanded edition in 2021.
Recording
The first new recording Black Sabbath made after the Heaven and Hell album was a version of the title track "The Mob Rules" for the soundtrack of the film Heavy Metal. The track "E5150" is also heard in the film but not included on the soundtrack. According to guitarist Tony Iommi's autobiography Iron Man: My Journey Through Heaven & Hell with Black Sabbath, the band began writing and rehearsing songs for Mob Rules at a rented house in Toluca Lake in Los Angeles. Initially the band hoped to record in their own studio to save money and actually purchased a sound desk; but, according to Iommi, "We just couldn't get a guitar sound. We tried it in the studio. We tried it in the hallway.
The public source identifies “Mob Rules (album)” as 1981 studio album by Black Sabbath. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Rules, album and studio.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q838908. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1981, 1980, 1992 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mob Rules (album)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.