No triggers. No samples. No plug-ins on the snare. The drums went to tape the way drums went to tape in 1986, and the man who decided that has been running this band since 1981.
We didn't use any additional digital effects on the individual drums, like the snare or bass drum. We also didn't use samples, plug-ins, or trigger signals.
Tom Angelripper, New Noise Magazine, 27 June 2025
Sodom put The Arsonist out through Steamhammer on 27 June 2025, thirteen tracks and forty nine minutes, their seventeenth album and the first in five years. Angelripper sings and plays bass, Frank Blackfire is back on lead guitar where he was in the eighties, Yorck Segatz plays rhythm, and Toni Merkel drums and produced the record as well, with Sebastian Niehoff mixing alongside him. It went to number four in Germany, which is where this band has always been properly understood.
The decision about the drums is audible and it is the best thing here. Four separate reviewers noticed it independently, which is unusual, and they are hearing something real: the kit sounds like a kit in a room, with a snare that has a bit of wood in it rather than the machined crack that every other thrash record has been using since about 2005. It gives the whole album a looseness that flatters the playing. Nothing sounds gridded. When the band accelerate, they accelerate slightly unevenly, the way four people do.
"Trigger Discipline" is the pick and the critics are unanimous on it, a short, fast, mean thing that could have come off any of the good eighties records without embarrassment. "Witchhunter" is named for Christian Dudek, who drummed on the first three Sodom albums and died in 2008, and the smart move was to make it a fast one with a call-and-response chorus rather than a slow tribute; the band clearly knew he would have preferred it. "The Spirits That I Called" is the one that reaches furthest back, close enough to the Venom and Celtic Frost end of things that you can hear where these men learned to play. And "Gun Without Groom" is the record's other gear, the mid-paced one, and it is where Angelripper's voice sounds most like a man arguing rather than performing.
Two things stop this being a great record rather than a good one. The first is that it does not go anywhere its last album did not. Half a dozen reviewers landed on the same word, continuation, and they are right: this is Genesis XIX with better drums and a couple of stronger songs. Nobody is asking a band on its seventeenth album to reinvent thrash, but a record that consolidates has to be judged as one.
The second is the mix, where the critics genuinely split. Now Spinning and Toilet ov Hell both call it well balanced and powerful. New Noise heard the opposite, an album quieter than its peers with the guitars sometimes sounding distant behind the vocals. Having lived with it, I lean towards New Noise. The rhythm guitars want another two decibels and a bit more air, and the irony is that the same analogue discipline that made the drums so good is probably what left the guitars sitting behind them.
A band spends five years making a record honestly, gets the drums right, and then plays it to nobody.
Which brings us to the part that is hard to leave out. Blackfire has said publicly that the band released this album and then did essentially nothing with it, that he thinks not playing live is a waste of a record, and he is not wrong. Angelripper has been open for a while about wanting to slow down and spend time at home, and after forty years he has earned that several times over. But thrash is not chamber music. These songs are built to be played in a hot room to people who have been waiting, and an album this well made deserves better than a catalogue number.
Buy it anyway. It is the sound of a band that still knows exactly what it is for, made with more care than most of what its contemporaries have released this decade, and it does not once trade on the past to get through a chorus. That is more than a lot of veterans manage. I would just like to hear it loud, in a room, with everyone shouting.