About four months after the release of
Blind Rage (2014), it was announced that guitarist
Herman Frank and drummer
Stefan Schwarzmann had parted ways with Accept. They were later replaced by
Uwe Lulis and Christopher Williams, respectively. On 5 June 2015, prior to the band's performance at the South Park festival in
Tampere,
Finland, bassist
Peter Baltes told Kaaos TV that Accept planned to begin work on a new album after the conclusion of the
Blind Rage tour. Asked in a July 2015 interview about the band's future, guitarist
Wolf Hoffmann replied, "We will continue for a few more weeks, this run of touring, and then we'll take a little break and come back in the fall, but we're pretty much wrapping up the
Blind Rage tour at this point; it's the very last phase of this whole cycle. And then the next album will have to be written and to be recorded, and how long that's gonna take and when that's all gonna happen, who knows? But it'll happen; that's all I know." Hoffmann stated that the new album would be released around July or August 2017. Like their previous three albums, the album was produced by
Andy Sneap, making it Accept's fourth collaboration with him. On 16 April 2017 Accept announced that the album, titled
The Rise of Chaos, would be released on 4 August. ==Critical reception==