M-16

M-16 marked Sodom's return to SPV and its Steamhammer label, and came out on 22 October 2001. Tom Angelripper has said there was no plan for a concept at the start: he had six or seven lyrics finished, found that every one of them dealt with Vietnam, and decided that the whole album would. Even the one cover, "Surfin' Bird", was chosen as a song of that era rather than a song about the war. He describes the result not as a concept album but as a Sodom album whose lyrics are about Vietnam, and for him the M-16 rifle of the title was the symbol of that war. The band recorded with Harris Johns in Brandenburg, just outside Berlin; the booklet places the sessions at Spiderhouse Studio in Lütte in July 2001, with the mixing in August. Angelripper remembers the three or four weeks they spent living at the studio as the last time the whole band shut itself away together to make a record. The credits name the band as producer, with Johns as engineer, mixer and co-producer. Before the release the band travelled through South-East Asia with its tour manager Manni Eisenblätter, a photographer and editor for Metal Hammer in Germany, visited Vietnam, and talked to people who had been injured by napalm or Agent Orange. That year Sodom also played shows in Bangkok and Saigon. Axel Hermann painted the cover. The album entered the German chart at number 88 in the week of 5 November 2001. BMG's twentieth-anniversary reissue brought it back at number 27 in the week of 3 December 2021. A limited edition added "Witching Metal" and "Devils Attack", and the Japanese edition, released on 21 February 2002, has the same two.