[2][3][6] The stress that resulted from the band's ongoing legal woes infiltrated the recording process, inspiring the album's title.

In the liner notes to the 1998 live album Reunion, Butler claimed the band suffered through 10 months of legal cases and admitted, "Music became irrelevant to me.

Osbourne, however, grew frustrated with how long Black Sabbath albums were taking to record, writing in his autobiography, "Sabotage took about four thousand years."

In 2013, Mojo observed, "Opener 'Hole in the Sky' and the crunching 'Symptom of the Universe' illustrate that, for all their problems, Sabbath's power remained undimmed on what was what many consider one of their finest offerings."

The final part of "Symptom of the Universe" evolved from an in-studio improvisation, created very spontaneously in a single day, and the decision was made to use it in that song.

The song was inspired by the frustrations Osbourne felt at the time, as Black Sabbath's former manager Patrick Meehan was suing the band after having been fired.

[13] The song viciously attacks the music business in general and is a savage diatribe directed towards Meehan specifically ("Are you Satan?

[16] The inverted mirror concept was conceived by Graham Wright, Bill Ward's drum tech, who was also a graphic artist.

[29] The album was certified Silver (60,000 units sold) in the UK by the BPI on 1 December 1975[30] and Gold in the US on 16 June 1997, but was the band's first release not to achieve platinum status in the US.

"[22] Later reviews were also favourable; Greg Prato of AllMusic said that "Sabotage is the final release of Black Sabbath's legendary First Six" but noted that "the magical chemistry that made such albums as Paranoid and Vol.

[32] In 1991, Chuck Eddy ranked Sabotage 20th in his 1991 book of the 500 best heavy metal albums, naming it the band's best and most eccentric album, consisting of "strange cut-up pastiches inside stranger cut-up pastiches" that hark back to the Firesign Theatre and William Burroughs and ahead to Queensrÿche's Operation: Mindcrime (1988).

He added: "Everything—concise solos, voices chanting 'opcit, opsist, obsessed....', evil laughs, seven seconds from some ancient jugband 78, choruses grunting 'suck me!

[26] The band toured the US in support of Sabotage in 1975, which included a filmed appearance for the prestigious series Don Kirshner's Rock Concert at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

Due to the band's expanding use of orchestras and other new sounds in the studio, the tour in support of Sabotage was the first in which Black Sabbath used a full-time keyboardist onstage, Gerald "Jezz" Woodroffe.

All tracks written by Black Sabbath (Geezer Butler, Tony Iommi, Ozzy Osbourne and Bill Ward).