DESTRUCTION TRIVIA
Trivia
Destruction were on the bill of Thrash Domination, the thrash festival held at Club Citta' in Kawasaki, four times between 2005 and 2016. The organiser's own records show them at Thrash Domination 05 on 17 and 18 September 2005 with Testament, Laaz Rockit and Kreator, and at 07 on 22 and 23 September 2007 with Nuclear Assault, Annihilator and Nevermore. The 2013 edition on 9 and 10 March, billed as "ANASTASIS", was a three-band event with Testament and Death Angel. For Thrash Domination 2016 in January they were billed with Kreator and Dark Angel, and a related headline show of their own was booked in Osaka, at Umeda Shangri-La, on 11 January.
In 2018 Destruction opened a tour of Asia and Australia in Tokyo. The Tokyo rock website Roppongi Rocks reported that the day before the show the band played a full rehearsal in a Tokyo studio for a small group of devoted fans, and that the venue in Meguro was sold out; backstage, Schmier reflected that without this job he would probably never have seen Japan. The return eight years later was East Asia Thrash Attack 2026 Japan, announced by the band on 25 November 2025, with dates at Yokohama ReNY beta on 30 January 2026, Shinjuku club SCIENCE in Tokyo on the 31st and PANHEAD GROOVE in Osaka on 1 February. By the band's account Tokyo sold out within minutes of the presale opening and Osaka within hours. The event page of Evoken de Valhall Production. introduced them as one of the three German thrash bands that Japanese fans group together with Sodom and Kreator.
Destruction grew out of Knight of Demon, a band Mike Sifringer and Tommy Sandmann were already playing in. Schmier remembers that there were only a handful of headbangers around Weil am Rhein, and that the band, short of a bass player, picked him out at a party on the strength of his long hair and a denim vest covered in patches. He had never played bass; the next day they went and bought him one. As the music grew heavier and faster, the name began to feel wrong. "Sonic Destruction" had a ring they liked, Schmier says, and a vote settled on Destruction. Around the same time their second guitarist left and they lost their rehearsal room, and in a 2000 interview Schmier added that the members who wanted something more melodic had walked away.
When the demo went out to labels, Noise Records wrote back that they did not sign punk bands — a story the band tells as a joke in the notes to High Roller's reissue. Of the labels that were interested they chose SPV/Steamhammer, the biggest at the time, and by their own account signed, inexperienced as they were, a deal that tied them down for years. According to Schmier the label did not start them off with an album: the Sentence of Death EP was a test, and a proper contract would follow if the fans took to it. The photographs have their own stories. The first session, for the demo, was shot between a cemetery and an old Nazi bunker in a member's home village, and the label signed them, the band says, because the three looked like brothers. The EP's photo was taken in a cemetery in Hanover, SPV's home base. The American edition used a different frame from the same 1984 shoot, and Tommy Sandmann says nobody ever asked the band about it; he still does not know whose decision it was, or why.
The Sentence of Death EP was recorded and mixed in September 1984 at Caet Studio in Berlin, in a session the label set up. Horst Müller did the mixing and mastering; the producer was Wolfgang Eichholz, guitarist of S.A.D.O., though Schmier laughs that the producer never showed his face and Müller did everything. Müller did well enough that the band kept him for Infernal Overkill. For Tommy Sandmann it was a step into the unknown: none of them had ever been to Berlin, they drove up in a truck along the transit route through East Germany, and at the border the guards eyed the band with as much suspicion as the band eyed them. Schmier remembers getting chills on the corridor road into West Berlin.
The lyric to "Mad Butcher" is Mike Sifringer's, written back in 1983 and drawn, as Schmier tells it, from the story of Jack the Ripper; it was one of the first songs the band ever wrote. It appeared on the 1984 Sentence of Death EP and was cut again in 1987, with new members and new twin solos, as the title track of the Mad Butcher EP. Looking back, the band put its status as their signature song down to a riff that sticks and a lyric soaked in splatter.
The Mad Butcher first took visible shape on the cover of the 1987 Mad Butcher EP, painted by the German artist Sebastian Krüger, who had also done the sleeve of Eternal Devastation the year before. How the character came about depends on who you ask. Schmier says there was no real-life model: remaking the old song was what the label wanted, because they saw potential in it, and he credits Krüger's painting with turning "the dude" into the band's mascot and a cult figure. Mike Sifringer remembers it differently: the butcher, he says, was their former manager's idea. By 2010 Schmier himself was calling the butcher the band's "classical" theme.
The Mad Butcher EP was recorded at the end of 1986 in Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia, with Kalle Trapp, formerly of Wonderland, producing. Its title song was a remake of the Sentence of Death track from barely two years before; new drummer Oliver Kaiser says it was one of the first songs the others jammed with him while he was being tried out. The Pink Panther theme at the end was a joke that stuck: Harry Wilkens started playing it as a lark and Kaiser, kidding around, put a hard-rock beat under it. After the sessions the label rang to say there was not enough material for what was then called a mini-LP, so Wilkens and Mike Sifringer went back into the studio and put "The Last Judgement" together in no time; Sifringer calls it more or less a jam and an experiment.
Original drummer Tommy Sandmann told the others he was leaving while they were still making Eternal Devastation. Schmier places the sessions in April 1986, in a small studio in the small Bavarian town of Hilpoltstein, and admits he cannot remember who picked it. The record gave the band its footing in Europe and their first headline tour, so Sandmann's news hit hard. For Sandmann, as devoted to the band as anyone, it was a wrench; he stepped aside so that someone who could lift the band higher could take over the kit, and that someone was Oliver Kaiser. Speaking in 2000, Schmier said Sandmann had since become a police officer, was delighted by the reunion, and had come to see the band play in Balingen.
Replacing Tommy Sandmann also turned Destruction into a four-piece. Mike Sifringer explains that Harry Wilkens, from the local band Razor's Edge, was the best lead player around and could handle technical, classical material, and that two guitars promised to make the music more interesting. According to Schmier, Wilkens had already come in for the Eternal Devastation tour with Kreator, and he was a friend of the new drummer, Oliver Kaiser. That run, with Rage also on the bill, was the band's first European headline tour; Schmier remembers how travelling in their own nightliner made them feel like rock stars, until the tour ended and the takings came to nothing. It was Wilkens, too, who suggested covering the Plasmatics' "The Damned" on the Mad Butcher EP. Kaiser credits him with the neo-classical streak in "Reject Emotions" — Wilkens was steeped in Bach's harmonies and in Paganini — and calls that song the band's answer to Metallica's Master of Puppets and the blueprint for Release from Agony.
The title Eternal Devastation started with Mike Sifringer's girlfriend. Her suggestion for an album title, Sifringer recalls, was "Uproaring Devastation", and the final title grew from there. The painting on the front is by the German artist Sebastian Krüger, who began with magazine cover spreads and record sleeves before giving up commercial work for free painting. The image was not his invention, though, Sifringer adds: the band described what they wanted and Krüger made it real.
Schmier dates a shift in Destruction's lyrics to Eternal Devastation, when he began writing more of them and the gloom of the early songs gave way to social criticism, and the two songs he still rates highest on the album have their own origins. In his 2000 account, "Life Without Sense" grew out of a motorbike accident that left a friend of Tommy Sandmann's badly disabled, and was written while the three of them still shared the lyric writing. "Curse the Gods" was Mike Sifringer's idea; Schmier said at the time that the band's deep hatred of the church made it an easy song to write. Sifringer, looking back in the notes to High Roller's reissue, reads it his own way: he accepts that believers may hate it, but insists the song is aimed at war.
After Infernal Overkill came out in 1985, Destruction toured Europe with Slayer, a run Schmier says changed their lives, and shortly afterwards, in November 1985, they went to Canada for World War III in Montreal. Voivod's manager Maurice Richard put the festival together to raise money for Voivod to record their second album; it was held at the Palladium, a converted roller rink, with Voivod, Celtic Frost, Possessed and Nasty Savage on the bill, and it was Destruction's first show outside Europe. Tommy Sandmann's memory of it starts the night before: a night out with some locals, a moment when he lost the others, and no idea of the hotel's name or address, since the band had only flown in that day. He spent the freezing November night walking the city, reached the hotel at dawn, sober by then, and had just enough time for a nap before the show.
Destruction's logo and its skull both made their debut on Infernal Overkill. Mike Sifringer traces the logo to a design idea a man in the United States sent him one day; it appealed to him but the lines were rough, so he tidied it up and gave the lettering its three-dimensional depth. Schmier admits that nobody then imagined the pair becoming a single trademark still in use more than thirty years later, and in a 2000 interview he confirmed that he had the album's cover tattooed on his arm.
The cover of Release from Agony is the work of the artist Joachim Luetke, and Mike Sifringer says the idea was entirely his: nasty, he concedes, but sometimes it is fun to shock people. Schmier admits that today it is difficult to imagine the shock it caused at the time. Their American label even received threats from upset parents, and in a big German metal magazine the same sleeve was voted both the best and the worst cover.
André Grieder of Poltergeist was one of the guest voices on Release from Agony, alongside two members of Kreator and V.O. Pulver. According to the band's own 2000 timeline, Destruction and frontman Schmier parted ways in 1989 while the band was recording its fourth album, Cracked Brain, and when the album came out in 1990 it was Grieder who sang on it as a guest, his only recording with the band. From 1991, the timeline goes on, Mike Sifringer and Oliver Kaiser carried the name on with new people. Speaking in 2000, Schmier traced the split to musical differences that set in once newer members began contributing to the songwriting.
The 1999 reunion took Schmier two attempts. He said in 2000 that Mike Sifringer turned him down the first time, and that when he asked again about six months later, in the spring of 1999, the two of them sat down and talked. laut.de's biography adds that Schmier was by then running a successful bistro, and that fans and Rock Hard magazine had put the idea in his head. On drums they chose Sven Vormann, a friend of Schmier's for years who had played in local bands and was a Destruction fan, and they started again as a three-piece with a single guitar. The band's own timeline names the comeback stages, Bang Your Head, With Full Force and Wacken Open Air, the biggest German metal open-airs, all in 1999, and Schmier later counted that Wacken comeback among the best concerts of his career.
Gyula Havancsák went on creating Destruction's covers. For Under Attack (2016) he realised an image Schmier had in his head before the album even had a title: the earth exploding, with the Destruction skull forming its continents. For Born to Perish (2019) Schmier asked for something simpler and unlike the earlier sleeves, so Havancsák put down the brush and worked in ink. Hearing the title, he imagined a coat of arms in which the customary brave lion or eagle gives way to two-headed vultures, and he has called it perhaps his favourite of all the covers he has made for them. The sleeve of Birth of Malice (2025) is his as well, and the band's announcement called him a master artist and a friend.
When Destruction reformed, Schmier was sure it had to be a three-piece with one guitar. In 2000 he reasoned that one guitar left more space for his bass, and that Mike Sifringer, having shared the stage with a second guitarist for years, was glad to have it to himself again. That changed with Born to Perish (2019). In the label's announcement Schmier called it the debut of a four-piece Destruction once more: it was the first album with Randy Black on drums and Damir Eskić on second guitar. Eskić is a Swiss guitarist of Bosnian descent who works as a guitar teacher and was once a pupil of Tommy Vetterli of Coroner; he also plays in Gomorra and had already contributed three solos to Under Attack in 2016.
Every Destruction entry on the official German album chart has lasted a single week. After the reunion, All Hell Breaks Loose reached No. 67, The Antichrist No. 89, Inventor of Evil No. 68, D.E.V.O.L.U.T.I.O.N. No. 65, Day of Reckoning No. 95 and Under Attack No. 68; then came Born to Perish at No. 26, Diabolical at No. 12 and, in 2025, Birth of Malice at No. 10. The live albums Born to Thrash and Live Attack reached No. 50 and No. 70. The band celebrated No. 12 as its best placing ever in 2022, then announced the No. 10 for Birth of Malice as the highest entry in its history. Birth of Malice also made No. 17 on the Swedish physical chart, the first time Destruction had ever charted in Sweden.
The Art of Destruction, a documentary about the band, had its world premiere on 6 March 2025 at the Cubix cinema on Berlin's Alexanderplatz, with a talk and signing session featuring Schmier and the filmmakers, Denise Dörner among them. Screenings around Germany followed, and a special event with Schmier and the filmmakers was set for 29 March at the kinopalast cinema in Weil am Rhein, the band's home town. The band made a point of its independence: no major company and no film fund had put money into it. Worldwide streaming began on 28 June 2025 on Thunderflix, Amazon Prime and Apple TV, with subtitles in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
The band counted 2022 as its fortieth year and chose a home crowd for the only anniversary show it played that year: Baden in Blut Metal Open Air in Weil am Rhein, in the corner of Germany where it borders France and Switzerland and where Destruction began. For the show, in July, former members Tommy Sandmann, Harry Wilkens, Sven Vormann and André Grieder joined in, along with co-producer V.O. Pulver, from the rehearsals through to the stage. Then a storm broke, and the organisers and the authorities stopped the show before its grand finale. The band apologised for the unfinished night and hoped to complete what they had started another time.
Destruction's first time on a stage was not at a show of their own. Speaking in 2000, Schmier recalled that Sodom had invited them along to a gig Sodom were headlining, which doubled as a Venom fan club meeting, with Venom there to sign autographs. When Sodom finished their set they told the newcomers to get up and play, and Destruction managed about two songs to a reaction that took them by surprise. Their real first gig followed a few weeks later in Essen, with Iron Angel and Sodom opening for them and Kreator, still calling themselves Tormentor, playing after them as a kind of guest spot. Nobody, Schmier said, worried about who topped the bill.
The cover of All Hell Breaks Loose, the first album after the reunion, is built out of Schmier's tattoos. He explained in a 2000 interview that the band put elements of them together into a sort of Destruction monster climbing out of hell, wanting an image that showed the band as one unit and carried the album's theme as well. Asked about the central figure's likeness to Pinhead, he readily owned the debt to Hellraiser, given the album's title, and admitted he had doubted the early sketches before the design came together.
Chrome bullet belts have been part of Destruction's look from the start. Schmier said in 2000 that the idea came from Venom, who in his view had taken it from Motörhead, and that Destruction simply wanted to push the bullets-and-leather image further than anyone. In May 2004 the belts caused real trouble. After a show in Brescia, Italian customs at Milan airport took exception to them and detained drummer Marc Reign. According to the band's statement, protests that the belts held no live rounds and were no weapon got them nowhere; after endless discussion the belts were confiscated and Reign was let go. It was only the second time in twenty years, after an incident in Peru, that their stage gear had caused trouble at an airport, and the statement, with the plane held up as well, signed off with a nod to Spinal Tap.
Nine guest singers from across metal's styles turn up on "The Alliance of Hellhoundz" from Inventor of Evil: Biff Byford of Saxon, Doro Pesch, Shagrath of Dimmu Borgir, Björn "Speed" Strid of Soilwork, former Iron Maiden singer Paul Di'Anno, Messiah Marcolin of Candlemass, Mark Osegueda of Death Angel, Peavy Wagner of Rage and Peter Tägtgren of Hypocrisy and Pain. Schmier was sure the all-star track would make metal history. The album was recorded at studios in Germany and Switzerland with Tägtgren, V.O. Pulver of Gurd and the band's live engineer Franky Winkelmann, and Tägtgren mixed it at Abyss Studios in Sweden.
Read down the track list of D.E.V.O.L.U.T.I.O.N. and the album title spells itself out: each of the ten song titles, from "D.evolution" to "N.o One Shall Survive", is printed with a full stop after its first letter. Schmier said that celebrating twenty-five years of Destruction was an extra spur to make a new classic. The album was recorded at Hansen Studios in Ribe, Denmark, with producer Jacob Hansen, and UFO guitarist Vinnie Moore contributed a few solos to the title track.
On Day of Reckoning (2011) the familiar butcher disappeared from the front cover. Announcing the artwork, Schmier headed off the complaints he could already hear from hardcore fans: the skull and the butcher were still there, inside the illustrated booklet. The album's idea, the last man alive at the end of the world, called for something sinister, he explained: a few stark symbols to carry its blunt title. The first limited edition carried no band logo on its booklet front, while the vinyl and the second CD pressing showed a red one. The artist was Gyula Havancsák from Hungary, who by Schmier's account had illustrated all of the band's recent releases.
In August 2021 Mike Sifringer, the one member who had been there through the band's entire history, left Destruction. Sifringer admitted that walking away after 39 years hurt, but felt it was time to stop once it no longer felt right. His replacement, Martin Furia, was born in Argentina, is based in Belgium and was known as a sound engineer and producer for Nervosa and Evil Invaders. He was no stranger, though: Furia had been travelling the world with the band since 2016 as its sound technician and tour manager, and Schmier said the chemistry was there because Furia had long been part of the Destruction family. His first recording with the band was the single "State of Apathy", released alongside the announcement.
V.O. Pulver of Gurd turns up again and again in Destruction's story. He first appears as one of the guest voices on Release from Agony. After the reunion, laut.de's biography calls him an old friend of Schmier's: the band recorded Metal Discharge (2003) at his Little Creek Studio in Switzerland and made the re-recording album Thrash Anthems with him. He worked on the recording of Inventor of Evil, handled some of the recording plus the mixing and mastering of Under Attack (2016), and recorded Born to Perish (2019) with the band at Little Creek. He also remastered High Roller's reissue of the Sentence of Death EP, and at the 2022 fortieth-anniversary show the band thanked him as its co-producer.