This war theme has always been around us. If you read newspaper every day and watch TV shows every day, there is always a war raging. I just wanna describe wars; I can't write anything about World War II because of Germany. I use the Vietnam War because everyone knows something about it. If I talk about Vietnam, everybody knows what I mean. Every war, Vietnam War, WW I and II, Gulf War, Bosnia crisis are all bad signals. We want to awake everybody up and say: "C'mon stop the wars! Do something!!" But you can't do that something; you just can't describe how bad it is. At that time we did BETTER OFF DEAD the Gulf War was going on...
Tom Angelripper / Sodom interview, Metal Rules, 2002
SODOM released their fourth album, Better Off Dead, on this day in 1990.
Vietnam war I think was one of the bloodiest. It was so absurd because Americans love the war. Now the situation is - we are bringing the new album next week and a lot of people will say, "Oh, come on. Why are you bringing it out now when the war is going to restart?" That's the thing, all the time at any place in the world there is a war going on, for example, when we wrote "Better Off Dead" the material there was about Gulf Crisis, when we wrote "Code Red" there was the Kosovo crisis. There is a war conflict at any time and any place - and my opinion is also in the lyrics.
Tom Angelripper / Sodom interview, Metal Kings, 2001