The instrumental drum solo on Black Sabbath’s Paranoid album is “Rat Salad.”
“Rat Salad” is a short instrumental track built around drummer Bill Ward’s playing. Unlike the album’s vocal songs, it has no sung lyrics and functions as a showcase for Ward’s rhythmic control, fills, and extended soloing. It appears near the end of the original album sequence, between “Iron Man” and “Fairies Wear Boots.”
Geezer Butler later explained that the band’s demanding early touring schedule helped create the need for long drum features. Black Sabbath sometimes played multiple sets in a night, and Ward could fill a substantial stretch of stage time with a solo. The studio version condenses that performance tradition into a compact album track.
Listeners sometimes confuse “Rat Salad” with “Embryo,” “Orchid,” or “Laguna Sunrise,” because those are also brief instrumental pieces associated with the band’s early albums. “Embryo” and “Orchid” are guitar-led interludes, while “Rat Salad” is specifically the drum-centered instrumental on Paranoid.