In early April 2009, Scorpions fan club ScorpNews.com announced that Scorpions would have entered the studio in the fall of the same year to record a new album. A couple of weeks later,
Klaus Meine officially confirmed that the band was working on new material in an interview for
Deutsche Welle. He explained that "after a very turbulent 2008 with 60 shows in 22 countries, we're now trying to breathe a bit and charge our batteries — but also to be creative". Two months later, the band had extended their
record deal with
Ariola Records. The band prepared about 18 songs for the album and teamed up with Swedish producers Mikael Nord Andersson an Martin Hansen. All the songs from the album are new written material, except four songs: "Slave Me", "No Limit", "Turn You On", "Spirit of Rock" and "The Best Is Yet to Come" which were written during the recording sessions for
Unbreakable. During those sessions "Turn You On" had a different title; "The Best Is Yet to Come" was planned to be recorded for the album following
Unbreakable, but when the band received an offer from
Desmond Child to record
Humanity: Hour I they kept the song and recorded it for this album.
James Kottak in the interview for Sleaze Roxx explained: "The first four songs that we wrote for this record were actually dark. I call them dark songs because they were probably too heavy compared to the stuff we've done in the past. They were in the vein of "The Good Die Young", but you can't have too many songs like that. I love "The Good Die Young" but I'm glad the way things evolved took us away from where we were headed initially in the songwriting process. We also co-wrote with our producers, Martin Hansen and Mikael Andersson, who took the whole thing to an entirely different level". Recording process started in May 2009 and took place in four different
recording studios. Main recording was done at Scorpio Sound Studio in
Hannover, Germany. Vocals were done in The Garage Studios in
Stockholm, while additional vocals were recorded in Vocal Land Studio. Drum parts were recorded at Atlantisstudion in Stockholm. By the mid-December 2009, the band had finished with the recording of the album. Just before Christmas, they invited people from the European record company people to a listening session. After they listened to the whole album the next day the management told the band that the record company loved it and that it was the best record in years. The management proposed the idea of this album being the last studio album and announcing a final tour.
Matthias Jabs explained "We had never spent a second thinking about this. For us, subconsciously, we thought it would go on forever. We were taken back a bit, but after a couple days living with the thought we decided together – that would be the right thing to do. We want to go out on top while we are still healthy and can still do a high-energy show that’s two, sometimes three hours a night." ==Composition and lyrical content==