Technical Ecstasy is the seventh studio album by English heavy metal band Black Sabbath, produced by guitarist Tony Iommi and released on 25 September 1976 by Vertigo Records. The album received mixed reviews from critics but was a commercial success, peaking at number 13 on the UK Albums Chart and number 51 on the US Billboard 200 Album chart, later being certified Gold by the RIAA in 1997. Composition and recording After frustrating legal battles that accompanied the recording of 1975's Sabotage, Sabbath chose Miami's Criteria Studios for the making of Technical Ecstasy, which continued the band's separation from the doom and darkness that had been a trademark of their earlier albums. "Some people may have heard the band in 1970", noted Iommi, "and be thinking, 'Oh no, not them again!' But if they heard us now, they probably might like us." In the July 2001 issue of Guitar World, Dan Epstein wrote, "The sessions proved extremely relaxing for everyone except Iommi, who was left to oversee the production while the others sunned themselves on the beach." Iommi explained to the same magazine in 1992, "We recorded the album in Miami, and nobody would take responsibility for the production. No one wanted to bring in an outside person for help, and no one wanted the whole band to produce it. So they left it all to me!" In the liner notes to the band's 1998 live album Reunion, Phil Alexander writes that, while the band struggled to finish the album, "rock had spawned a new set of iconoclasts as the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Damned… Suddenly Sabbath found themselves both unsure of their musical direction and labeled as has-beens." "It's not like now: If you're a heavy metal band, you put out a heavy metal album", Butler explained to Uncut in 2014. "Back then, you had to at least try to be modern and keep up. Punk was massive then and we felt that our time had come and gone." To make matters worse for the band, manager Don Arden began spending more of his time focusing on another of his acts, Electric Light Orchestra, whose 1975 album Face The Music was their first to make the US top ten. Iommi's determination to move Sabbath in a new direction was misguided according to some, with Mick Wall noting in the 2013 book Black Sabbath: Symptom of the Universe