Sodom

Sodom’s history begins in 1981 when Tom Angelripper and his four friends started a band whose name is a tribute to Venom and their song “One Thousand Days in Sodom.” The band was born out of Tom’s desperation for a lifepath that would lead him away from the hard labour in the coalmines – and we can now say that he was successful in forging it.

Sodom quickly turned from a four-piece to a three-piece and in 1985, released their first EP, “In the Sign of Evil”, that was followed a year later by their first full-length album, “Obsessed by Cruelty”. These raging and obscure records in a couple of years would become the fuel for the then-emerging black metal scene, but the Germans had other plans on where to go from there. The group started playing in a more classic, thrash metal style and the two subsequent albums, “Persecution Mania” (1987) and “Agent Orange” (1989), brought the band global fame. The latter album, not long after its premiere, became one of the best-selling albums in Germany at the time, charting at number 36.

In the ‘90s, the band faced many struggles, and the waning popularity of thrash metal pushed Sodom to experiment with other styles, such as hardcore, groove metal or death metal. At the end of the decade, however, the band returned to the thrash sound with albums “Code Red and M-16” (though the latter was released in 2001), gaining new fans and inspiring old ones to return as well.

Sodom has enjoyed a solid reputation ever since and is considered to be one of the legends of the thrash metal scene, forming with Kreator and Destruction The Great Three of Teutonic Thrash. The band’s latest album is the 2022 40 Years at War – “The Greatest Hell of Sodom”.