Zakk Wylde is not going to argue that the album format is holding up. He is going to argue that you should still make one, and then release it however the market wants it.
Asked by Scott Davidson of Chicago's Rebel Radio about artists who no longer believe in full-lengths, the BLACK LABEL SOCIETY guitarist conceded the point and then routed around it. "I get it," he said. "But I'm just saying if you end up recording 10 songs, you just release all 10 over a length of time."
That is a distinction worth holding onto. The complaint from a lot of musicians is that albums do not pay; Wylde's answer is that the recording session and the release schedule are separate problems, and collapsing them means you end up writing three songs a year instead of ten.
He is clear-eyed about how much has changed since he was in the middle of it. "It's different than like when we made [Ozzy Osbourne's] 'No More Tears'," he said. "It's just, like, where you would put your single out, and then the album gets released."
His reference point for productivity is the band he now spends a good deal of his life playing tribute to. BLACK SABBATH released their first six albums between 1970 and 1975. "That's like six albums within five years," Wylde said. "I mean, that's insane. And they were doing shows in between and everything like that."
The other half of the equation is the road, which has swung the opposite way. "Now, you put an album out, you could literally tour for two years on one record," he said — a sentence that quietly explains the whole economics of modern metal. When touring is the revenue and recording is the marketing, the pressure to produce six albums in five years simply evaporates.
Wylde has been putting his own model into practice. BLACK LABEL SOCIETY released "Engines Of Demolition" in March 2026 through MNRK Heavy — fifteen tracks, including the previously issued singles "Name In Blood", "Broken And Blind", "The Gallows" and "Lord Humungus", plus "Ozzy's Song", his tribute to the man who hired him nearly four decades ago.
Wylde joined Ozzy Osbourne's band at twenty and played on every solo album except 2020's "Ordinary Man", including "No More Tears", "Ozzmosis" and "Black Rain". BLACK LABEL SOCIETY, formed in 1998, have put out more than a dozen records of their own, two of which — "Order Of The Black" and "Catacombs Of The Black Vatican" — went top five on the hard rock charts. Fifteen tracks at a time, he is still doing it the old way.