Decision Day

Decision Day was released by Steamhammer/SPV on 26 August 2016; the Japanese edition, from Ward Records, had come out a week earlier, on 19 August. Tom Angelripper on bass and vocals, Bernemann on guitar and Markus "Makka" Freiwald on drums spent four months in the studio working the songs into shape. The producer was Cornelius Rambadt, a sound engineer who was also the drummer in Tom Angelripper's side project Onkel Tom, and the credits share the production between him and the band. Rambadt also recorded and mixed the album, and Dennis Koehne mastered it. The announcement of the album linked it to D-Day, the Allied landing in Normandy in June 1944, and singled out "Belligerence", "Decision Day" and "Strange Lost World" as songs in which Tom Angelripper looks at history and at events of the present day. "Caligula", which he named as one of his favourite songs on the album, is about the Roman emperor, and its lyric video appeared on 12 August. "Sacred Warpath", the tenth track, had first been issued on the 2014 EP of the same name. The cover painting is by Joe Petagno, the artist behind Motörhead's Overkill, Orgasmatron and Another Perfect Day. Petagno said he set out to picture the history of mankind and used the mascot Knarrenheinz as a symbol of the countless people sent to fight down the centuries, and Tom Angelripper, a Motörhead fan, called the cover a dream fulfilled. The album came as a digipak CD with a double-sided poster, a double LP on 180-gram red vinyl with the CD and the bonus track "Predatory Instinct", a box set limited to 1,000 copies, an iTunes version with the bonus track, and a download. Japan had two editions: a CD adding "Predatory Instinct" (GQCS-90198) and a first-press limited edition with a DVD of five live songs (GQCS-90196/7). The album entered the German album chart at number 7 and stayed for three weeks. No Sodom album had placed higher in Germany until then.