The least-loved albums by veteran artists tend to find their way, in time, to critical rehabilitation. It’s practically an inevitability, particularly if the artist in question is deemed sufficiently historic. Lou Reed’s notorious Metal Machine Music was reviled on its release only to become recontextualized as the urtext of the harsh noise genre. What was once dismissed as kitschy and chintzy on Dylan’s ’80s records became a bedrock of the War On Drugs’ acclaimed sound. This website has mounted (partial) defenses of Metallica’s dire St. Anger and Lulu on recent anniversaries, and Pitchfork controversially rescored a bunch of reviews in 2021, elevating onetime duds by Wilco, Daft Punk, and Lana Del Rey to the canon. Stay in the conversation long enough and you might discover that you no longer have any bad albums.

Black Sabbath are about as canonical as it gets, but that hallowed designation has typically only been bestowed upon their early, Ozzy Osbourne-fronted work. “You can only trust yourself and the first six Black Sabbath albums,” the famous Henry Rollins quote goes, a count that excludes not only the Ronnie James Dio era but the Ozzy-led Technical Ecstasy and Never Say Die! Tony Iommi may have invented heavy metal with the tritone riff of “Black Sabbath” back in 1970, this line of thinking apparently goes, but he was quickly surpassed. The first two Dio albums, Heaven And Hell and Mob Rules, have since ascended into immortality; they’re not quite as formally groundbreaking as the ’70s work, but the songs are undeniable. (If forced to pick one Black Sabbath to listen to for the rest of my life, I’d unhesitatingly choose Heaven And Hell.) Even 1983’s grimy Born Again, the only Sabbath album to feature Deep Purple vocalist Ian Gillan, has its share of defenders. But one era that almost never gets brought up in discussions of Sabbath’s legacy is the decade they were fronted by Tony Martin, from 1987 to 1997.

The five albums that Martin sang on – The Eternal Idol, Headless Cross, Tyr, Cross Purposes, and Forbidden – have long been relegated to zealots-only status. “Anything after [Born Again] is recommended only to diehard freaks who can’t go a day without hearing yet another spitfire lick from their master’s Gibson, fans of train wrecks who want to hear The Eternal Idol (one of Iommi’s attempts to cross over into the world of Eighties pop metal), and Otto the bus driver,” as the Rolling Stone Record Guide so bluntly put it. Now four of those albums (excluding only The Eternal Idol, for rights reasons) have been compiled into a deluxe box set, the lavish Black Sabbath: Anno Domini 1989-1995. It’s the first time the Martin era has ever been highlighted in a collection like this. Its reappraisal has finally arrived.

Black Sabbath were in shambles when Martin joined the band. In 1986, they’d released Seventh Star, a middling record that was supposed to be a Tony Iommi solo album. The label insisted that Iommi had a contractual obligation to deliver a Sabbath album, so Seventh Star was credited to “Black Sabbath Featuring Tony Iommi.” (No other original Sabbath members appeared on the record.) Glenn Hughes sang on Seventh Star, but he was far from the only vocalist to find himself in Black Sabbath in the post-Dio ’80s. Hughes, Ian Gillan, Ron Keel, Jeff Fenholt, Dave Donato, and Ray Gillen all did stints. While metal was arguably at its all-time peak in popularity, the founders of the genre simply couldn’t find their footing. When Martin first entered the picture, he must have seemed like just another anonymous face in the parade of failed Sabbath singers. In fact, he was initially hired to replace Ray Gillen, who had recorded scratch vocals for The Eternal Idol but crashed out of the band before they entered the studio.

The critical and commercial winds were against Sabbath well before Martin joined the band, and unsurprisingly, the addition of an unknown young singer didn’t turn the tides. Never mind that Martin may have been, on a technical level, the strongest singer in Sabbath history. He didn’t have the ability to repair their reputation. In his 2023 memoir Into The Void, founding Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler refers to the Tony Martin version of the band as “Sabbath” — always in scare quotes. He even contends that the Martin-fronted Cross Purposes, which he appeared on, isn’t a real Sabbath album. “Sabbath had become too confusing for people,” Butler writes. “How many lineup changes can a fan put up with?”

Iommi, the band’s only consistent member across 19 studio albums, sees things a bit differently. In Iron Man, his 2011 autobiography, he put it like this: “How I’ve always looked on it is that you replace somebody when they leave. It’s like if you have a factory; if somebody leaves, you don’t close down the factory, you replace him.” Iommi never left Sabbath, so Sabbath never ceased to exist — at least, that’s how Iommi feels. Yet it was Butler’s perspective that proved more common among fans and press. Through no fault of his own, Martin was entering a band at their nadir. At least in the short run, he couldn’t pull them out of it.

Despite being responsible for the creation of heavy metal, the first version of Black Sabbath was only intermittently a metal band. They were quite literally making it up as they went along, which meant there were as many apocalyptic proto-doom dirges as there were acoustic pieces, piano ballads, hippie jams, blues chooglers, and oddball studio experiments. That began to change with the standardization of the definition of metal. Dio joined the band just as the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, arguably the world’s first-ever metal scene, was starting to blow up. Iommi and Butler adapted, leaving behind most of their stylistic detours in favor of wall-to-wall heavy metal thunder on Heaven And Hell and Mob Rules. Even the ballads, some of the finest songs of the Dio era, functioned more like slow-burning, melodic epics. By the time Martin came along, Sabbath were undeniably a metal band.

For folks who prized the Promethean sense of discovery found on the earliest Sabbath records, it’s understandable that their becoming “a metal band” wasn’t quite as exciting. But what a metal band they were! Rolling Stone’s description of The Eternal Idol as “pop metal” is mystifying to me. From the doomy opening passage of “The Shining,” Martin’s Sabbath debut is a masterclass in dark, classicist heavy metal. In both the songwriting – “The Shining” generously nods to “Heaven And Hell” – and Martin’s full-throated delivery, it’s clear Iommi was trying to recapture some Dio-era magic. But Martin’s baritone is at once smokier and more precise than Dio’s, and he’s less given to pyrotechnics and ad-libs, preferring to stick close to the melodic line. He’s the rock-solid presence at the center of tracks like “Ancient Warrior” and “Hard Life To Love,” and he confidently guides the album-closing doom epic “Eternal Idol” through some huge, histrionic passages. (Martin doesn’t abuse his falsetto, but when he does reach for it, the results tend to be magnificent.) The Eternal Idol certainly recapitulated some of the successes of Heaven And Hell and Mob Rules, but it also established a new signature Sabbath sound, one that would stick around for the next decade.

Part of that sound was thanks to the late keyboardist Geoff Nicholls, who joined Sabbath for Seventh Star and stuck around through Forbidden, making him the only person besides Iommi to appear on all those records. (Dio returned for 1992’s Dehumanizer, which came out right in the middle of the Martin era. Sabbath drama never ends, sometimes it just gets reduced to a simmer.) Nicholls’ synths are an assertive presence on The Eternal Idol, adding loads of color and atmosphere to the proceedings, especially to the doomier tracks. The rhythm sections on the Martin albums were admittedly a bit of a revolving door, but with Iommi and Nicholls joining the singer on each record, there’s a sense that that version of Sabbath was a true band.

The Tony Martin era’s alleged illegitimacy hinges, for some people, on the fact that Iommi wanted to launch a solo career with Seventh Star. For those critics, the Black Sabbath name that hung around after Martin was in the fold was merely an extension of the music-biz chicanery that led to “Black Sabbath Featuring Tony Iommi.” If we take that criticism seriously, then we’d have to come up with a definition of Black Sabbath that doesn’t rely on Iommi’s presence. That would mean Mob Rules, which featured Iommi and Butler but not Osbourne or founding drummer Bill Ward, is either A) not a true Black Sabbath album, or B) only a Black Sabbath album because Geezer Butler is on it. Option A is self-evidently ridiculous, but if B is true, then we have to ignore Butler’s own stance on Cross Purposes, the Martin-era album that he plays on but doesn’t recognize as Black Sabbath. It’s all a bit ridiculous, right?

Besides, listening to any of the Martin records definitively answers the question of how to best define a Black Sabbath album. It’s Iommi. It’s always been Iommi. Some of his best-ever playing is strewn across these songs, and he’s always unmistakably himself. His tunings, his tone, his deceptively complex riffs, the phrasing of his leads — they all tether these albums to a platonic ideal of Sabbathness. It’s especially fun to hear him playing in a more explicitly metal mode. That starts on The Eternal Idol, but it reaches its apotheosis on the ultra-heavy Headless Cross and Tyr. By the dawn of the ’90s, metal had more or less sorted itself into the subgenres we’re familiar with today — thrash, doom, death metal, black metal, and so on. Like Judas Priest’s 1990 speed-metal rebirth, Painkiller, 1989’s Headless Cross and 1990’s Tyr face their younger challengers head-on. Bands like Candlemass and Solitude Aeturnus had begun laying the groundwork for the sound that would become known as epic doom metal. I doubt Iommi had any idea he was making epic doom metal, but with Martin in tow, he made two of the genre’s best albums. (In an all-time metal what-if, Martin auditioned for Candlemass in 2004.)

After the dark, moody Headless Cross and the Viking-themed pseudo-concept album Tyr, Iommi found a way to temporarily smooth over the bad blood with Butler, Dio, and Mob Rules drummer Vinny Appice. Martin rehearsed for 1992’s Dehumanizer, but he was ultimately (and awkwardly) asked to leave so Dio could step in to record the album. Dehumanizer is probably a top-five Sabbath record for me, so I’m not mad about what unfolded. But it couldn’t have been easy for Martin when Dio quit again, and he was asked to come back for Cross Purposes the following year. “He got screwed around by us so many times,” Iommi laments in Iron Man. No shit.

Cross Purposes isn’t as heavy as its immediate predecessors in the Sabbath discography, but it does benefit from the resurgent Iommi-Butler pairing. Despite Butler practically disowning the album, he wrote some great tunes for it: “I Witness,” “Psychophobia,” “Evil Eye,” which was co-penned with an uncredited Eddie Van Halen. The towering highlight is “Cross Of Thorns,” the best Black Sabbath ballad of all time. It’s built around a graceful soft/loud dynamic, a truly killer bridge, and one of Iommi’s finest solos. I don’t know if Martin is the only Sabbath singer who could have pulled off its highly theatrical arc – it would have been interesting to hear Dio try it – but for me, it’s his signature song with the band. Someone posted “Cross Of Thorns” on a message board I frequented as a teenager, back when I had no context for Martin’s place in the Sabbath arc, and I thought it was the best shit I’d ever heard. I just listened to it four times in a row, and I still think that.

Unfortunately, things started to fall apart not long after the release of Cross Purposes. Butler left the band again, and his absence as a songwriting foil to Iommi was acutely felt on 1995’s Forbidden. When people clown on the Tony Martin era of Black Sabbath, they’re usually talking about Forbidden. It’s hard to blame them. The endless years of lineup turmoil had clearly taken their toll on Iommi, and even though the songs take vaguely Sabbath-like shapes, something is off. He just didn’t have the juice. For his part, Martin sounds either tired or bored throughout much of the record. In Iommi’s book, the chapter on Forbidden is called “The one that should have been Forbidden.”

One of the clumsier missteps on Forbidden is also the thing that most directly ties it back to early Sabbath. Ice-T delivers a guest verse on the opening track, “The Illusion Of Power.” It’s not a great verse, and it doesn’t really sound like it belongs on the song. But by reaching beyond the walls of his heavy metal cage to interact with hip-hop, Iommi was tapping into the experimentalism of his early career. As much as anything else, that decision revealed the writing on the wall for that era of Black Sabbath. Martin was out of the band by 1997, clearing the way for Ozzy to rejoin for a series of nostalgia tours and a Rick Rubin-produced album, 13. (Dio also rejoined in 2006, but they called that version of the band Heaven & Hell.) Martin released a passably Sabbathian album called Thorns in 2022, but he hasn’t played with Iommi since ’97.

Maybe the Tony Martin era is still only for the “diehard freaks,” like Rolling Stone wrote. For decades, his albums have been the ugly stepchildren of the Sabbath discography. When used CD stores were a thing, they were reliable dollar-bin fodder. As time goes by, though, more and more diehard freaks seem to come out of the woodwork. It’s not unusual for me to get a doom metal promo tagged as “RIYL Tony Martin-era Black Sabbath,” as I did with the French band Ecclesia’s excellent Ecclesia Militans earlier this year. Philly’s Crypt Sermon, critical darlings on the cusp of releasing their third album The Stygian Rose, have absorbed the influence of Headless Cross and Tyr into an expansive epic doom sound. (Though he’s primarily a Dio devotee, their singer Brooks Wilson told Epic Metal Blog in 2020 that “Tony Martin has taught me a lot of ways to expand my range.”) The Tony Martin fans are out here, and if we’re not yet legion, we at least think we’re on the right side of history.

The Martin albums will never be revered the way the Ozzy and Dio records are, and that’s fine. At any rate, the Anno Domini box should give them a chance to step into the sun, to breathe, and to exist on their own terms. Martin and Iommi shot a conversational series of YouTube videos as promo for the box, and they seem prouder than ever of the work they did together. The box set editions make the material sound the best it ever has, with remastering jobs applied to all the records and a full remix of Forbidden, helmed by Iommi. If you haven’t taken the plunge into these records yet, now’s as good a time as ever. If you choose not to, they’ll still be here when you’re ready. Everything gets rehabilitated eventually.

Anno Domini 1989-1995 is out 5/31 via Rhino.