1982

Tom Angelripper and Sodom wrote "1982" to look back on the band's first steps, in the music as much as in the words. It was first heard in 2022: as a single and music video on 12 August, and on the four-track bonus CD of the Europe-only box set of the 40th-anniversary album 40 Years at War - The Greatest Hell of Sodom, released on 28 October. That bonus CD also held new recordings of three early songs, "Witching Metal", "Victims of Death" and "Let's Fight in the Darkness of Hell". This EP gathers those four with a re-recorded "Equinox", which in 2022 had been a bonus on the box set's cassette only, and opens with "1982 (Remix)". "Witching Metal" is the song the three young members were cutting for their first demo tape in a rehearsal room in Altenessen, Essen, in the spring of 1982; "Victims of Death" and "Let's Fight in the Darkness of Hell" come from the 1983 demo tape Victims of Death, and "Equinox" from the 1986 album Obsessed by Cruelty. The band noted that the songs were now on vinyl, and some of them on CD, for the first time. The line-up is Angelripper, Frank Blackfire, Yorck Segatz and Toni Merkel. Angelripper said that the band would write and arrange such songs differently today, but saw the EP as a short trip back to the atmosphere of the early 1980s. Steamhammer/SPV announced the EP on 25 August 2023, released a music video for "1982 (Remix)" on 29 September and put the record out on 10 November as a CD-EP digipak, a 140-gram 12-inch in cristallo vinyl with a printed inner sleeve, a download and a stream. It spent one week on the German album chart, at number 49, and the band set up a tour in the spirit of its early years for 2023 and 2024. In Japan, the five songs became the second disc of the limited edition of the 2025 album The Arsonist.