Code Red

This is the second album by the trio of Tom Angelripper, Bernemann and Bobby Schottkowski, the follow-up to 'Til Death Do Us Unite. It moved Sodom from GUN Records to Drakkar Records, with BMG again handling distribution, and came out on 31 May 1999. Code Red is the US Marines' name for a notorious punishment; the band's own website, in a text it carried in 2006, gave that origin for the title and presented the record as one more on which the three kept to political subjects. Harris Johns produced, recorded and mixed it, as he had the previous album, and the band is credited as co-producer. According to the booklet credits, it was recorded at Spiderhouse Studio and Real Sound Studio and mixed at Spiderhouse, and Klaus Arndt mastered it at DMS in Marl. Johns also plays the lead guitar on "The Wolf & the Lamb". Angelripper is credited with the music and the lyrics, and the band with the arrangements. The cover painting is by Axel Hermann. Looking back in 2021, Angelripper called Code Red a typical Sodom album and said it was exactly the direction the band wanted to take on the records that followed. The album runs to thirteen tracks and opens with a short "Intro". A limited two-CD edition added a bonus disc, the tribute Homage to the Gods, on which fifteen bands, Cradle of Filth, Impaled Nazarene, Dark Funeral and Brutal Truth among them, each play one Sodom song. The Japanese edition followed on 5 November 1999 with the same thirteen tracks.