Ozzy Osbourne didn’t stop planning. Even at 76, with a failing heart and a body battered by half a century of chaos, he still wanted to make one more record. Longtime guitarist Zakk Wylde has now revealed what that final album, the one that will never be, might have sounded like.
Speaking to NJ.com, Wylde said the Prince of Darkness was deep into the idea before his death in July. “He was texting me, ‘Zakk, let’s do another record,’” Wylde recalled. “Because I really loved it when you were going through your Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd phase when we did No More Tears, it’s heavy but it’s more melodic, it’s not pummelling heavy.’ So I said, ‘Alright Oz, whatever you want.’”
That phrase, whatever you want, has been the defining dynamic between the two for nearly four decades. Wylde, the battle-scarred student; Ozzy, the unpredictable master of ceremonies. Together, they fused blues-inspired melody and metal heft, producing some of the most distinctive tones in rock’s modern canon.
Ozzy’s death on July 22, just 17 days after his farewell concert Back to the Beginning in Birmingham, still feels surreal. The night had felt triumphant, almost cleansing: two sets, one with Wylde and his solo band, another with the reunited original Black Sabbath lineup, their first time sharing a stage since 2005. No one, least of all Zakk, thought it would be the last. “Whatever things we’ve run into, any obstacles or whatever, it’s always just a speed bump and we’ll get through it,” Wylde said. “I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, this is the last time I’m going to see Oz.’”
But it was.
In his posthumous memoir Last Rites, published in October, Ozzy confirmed that he already had a concept for another solo record: “Although I won’t be performing again, I’ve already got an idea for a new album.” He knew his health was in decline, the sepsis, the heart valve, the arrhythmia he joked was like “a drummer in a bad pub band”, but the idea of quitting simply never occurred to him.
And that’s what Wylde’s comments underscore. The project Ozzy wanted wouldn’t have been another wall of sound or a desperate late-career comeback. It would have been No More Tears 2: introspective, soulful, heavy without brutality, melody at war with mortality.
On July 30, tens of thousands lined the streets of Birmingham as Ozzy’s procession crossed the Black Sabbath Bridge. Fittingly, his music echoed through speakers and smartphones alike, a chorus of grief and celebration for a man who, to the end, kept thinking about the next riff.
If Zakk’s memories tell us anything, it’s that Ozzy didn’t just live for metal. He lived through it. And even in death, you can almost hear him, laughing, scheming, and texting his guitarist: “Zakk, let’s do another record.”
