'Til Death Do Us Unite

By 1996 Sodom's contract with Steamhammer had run out, and the label's only release for the band that year was the best-of Ten Black Years. Tom Angelripper used the pause to record Ein Schöner Tag with Onkel Tom. The band came back to life once he had found two new players, Bernemann on guitar and Bobby Schottkowski on drums, and the following year GUN Records put this album out, on 24 February 1997, with BMG handling distribution. Interviewed in 2021, Angelripper remembered the first record by this trio as the work of a completely new band. Harris Johns produced and engineered it. The booklet credits place the recording at RA.SH Studio and a remix at Music Lab in Berlin, and list the band among the producers as well; Johns also takes the second guitar solo in the closing "Hey, Hey, Hey Rock'n Roll Star". Angelripper wrote all the music and all the lyrics, with one exception: the ninth track, "Hazy Shade of Winter", is a song by Paul Simon. "Gisela" and "Schwerter zu Pflugscharen" are sung in German. Angelripper, Bernemann and Schottkowski stayed together to make Code Red (1999), M-16 (2001) and the self-titled album Sodom (2006), and Johns recorded Code Red and M-16 with them too. In 2006 the band's own website described the trio, then ten years old, as the most stable line-up the band had ever had. The Japanese edition followed on 23 April 1997 with the same fifteen tracks.