STORMBREEDERS OF DEATH, a tribute to the mid-1980s politically incorrect project STORMTROOPERS OF DEATH (S.O.D.),will perform at this year’s Milwaukee Metal Fest on Friday, May 16 at The Rave / Eagles Club in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The STORMBREEDERS OF DEATH lineup for this special performance will consist of two members of the original STORMTROOPERS OF DEATH, guitarist Scott Ian and bassist Danny Lilker, along with HATEBREED frontman Jamey Jasta on vocals and Scott‘s son Revel Ian on drums.

STORMTROOPERS OF DEATH are commonly credited as being among the first bands to fuse hardcore punk with thrash metal into a style sometimes called “crossover thrash.” The track “March Of The S.O.D.” from the group’s debut LP, “Speak English Or Die”, was the “Headbangers Ball” intro song for many years.

STORMTROOPERS OF DEATH was formed shortly after Ian finished his guitar tracks on the ANTHRAX album “Spreading The Disease”. He would draw pictures of the face of a character known as “Sargent D,” and the pictures would be accompanied by slogans such as “I’m not racist; I hate everyone” and “Speak English Or Die.” Ian would then wrote lyrics about this character. He decided to form a hardcore band based on Sargent D, so he recruited Lilker, ANTHRAX drummer Charlie Benante and vocalist Billy Milano.

The 30th-anniversary edition of “Speak English Or Die” was made available in November 2015 via Megaforce. The set included the original album as well as the demo recordings from the pre-STROMTROOPERS OF DEATH project CRAB SOCIETY NORTH.

In a recent interview with Screamer Magazine, Lilker spoke about the fact that S.O.D. garnered controversy even back in the day for the deliberately offensive lyrics of songs like “Speak English Or Die” and “Fuck The Middle East”. He said:  ”There were some people that we did wanna piss off a little bit, but if you couldn’t tell that we were kind of being just obnoxious and provocative… People weren’t looking at the big picture. We also had a song on the record about being hung over and having no milk in the fridge. And you had to step out a little bit. And by the way, ‘Fuck The Middle East’ is still relevant. And we wrote a song about a guy in a movie with impossibly long fingers who would fucking slice your throat off with. So, sure, calling the record ‘Speak English Or Die’ — and we’re not gonna get into the cancel culture conversation, by the way. I know that [the S.O.D. album] couldn’t happen today, and we all know that. But let’s just say that we knew what we were doing. I don’t regret any of it. I know some people might’ve thought, ‘That’s over the line,’ but then we weren’t really like that. We were just being perhaps a tiny bit reckless, but S.O.D. was about the music. The lyrics were just kind of like — I was gonna say icing on the cake, but it’s more like salt. I don’t know.”

In a 2018 interview with the “Let There Be Talk” podcast, Ian defended the lyrics on “Speak English Or Die”, saying: “You’ve gotta understand, this was a character — I was writing for a character. This isn’t how I feel, as Scott Ian. I created a guy named Sargent D, who I was writing a comic book about and I wrote songs based on it. And if you don’t get it, go fuck yourself. I will never apologize, because that’s where it comes from.”

Three years ago, Ian told Metal Hammer magazine about “Speak English Or Die”: “If it had never existed in 1985 and we tried to put that out today, no matter how hard we tried to explain the joke or the humor, yes, certain sections of people would cancel it. It would have a much harder time now. We didn’t have Internet back then.

“If people don’t know, Sargent D is a character that I created, because I wanted to try and make a comic book,” Ian further clarified. “I didn’t know how to write a comic book, so I wrote songs about this character, who’s dead. He’s unliving, and therefore he hates anything alive. We explained it a few times in interviews back then, but either people want to hear it or they don’t.”