In the Sign of Evil

The first thing Sodom of Gelsenkirchen put on record: a five-song EP running a little over nineteen minutes. It was cut at Caet Studio in Berlin in October 1984 and released by Devil's Game in January 1985, with Tom Angelripper on vocals and bass, Grave Violator on guitar and Witchhunter on drums. Neither the playing nor the recording is tidy, and the untidiness is close to the reason the record keeps being cited. The run and the distortion of "Outbreak of Evil", "Blasphemer" and "Witching Metal" come from somewhere earlier than the thrash of the same years — the same place Venom and Bathory came from. That is why it is counted in the first wave of black metal; none of the organised writing Sodom would later bring to thrash is here yet. Spotify has no standalone entity for the EP. It carries it paired with the 1986 album Obsessed by Cruelty as a twenty-track release, which is what the player on this page is; the first five songs are this record.