Black Sabbath announced its final world tour, "The End," to begin in January, a grand finale to almost 50 years of heavy metal music.
In a video promoton of "The End," Black Sabbath said "the heaviest rock sound ever heard" will exit the stage after touring the world in 2016.
The English rock band launched in 1968, and its four members – Tommy Iommi, Geezer Butler, Ozzy Osbourne, and Bill Ward – "marked a paradigm shift in the world of rock," the group's
website said. "Not until Black Sabbath upended the music scene did the term 'heavy metal' enter the popular vocabulary to describe the denser, more thunderous offshoot of rock over which they presided."
Iommi, Butler, and Osbourne will be on the group's final world tour, and some fans went online to take issue with Ward's exclusion. According to
Rolling Stone, the group and Ward had a falling out over unspecified reasons. In April, Ward told the magazine, "I don't know if I'm still a member."
"No bill ward again? no new album as they have promised?" one fan commented on the group's "The End"
YouTube announcement.
But most fans greeted the tour announcement with excitement, and pleas for the group to add dates in countries around the world peppered social media. Others questioned whether the group would still put out the new album of music, as promised.
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