The story of Slayer

South Gate beginnings

Slayer's story begins in the working class suburbs south of Los Angeles in 1981. Kerry King was a seventeen year old guitarist who had picked up the instrument at thirteen, after his father pushed him toward a hobby that would keep him out of the wrong crowd. At an audition for a forgotten local rock band called Ledger, he heard another teenager noodling on a guitar near the front desk. It was Jeff Hanneman, playing Judas Priest and AC/DC. The two got talking, jammed on Iron Maiden and Priest songs, and King asked why they didn't just start their own band. Hanneman said yes on the spot, and Slayer was born.[1] [2] [3]

The other two pieces came from the neighbourhood. Tom Araya had been born in Viña del Mar in Chile in 1961 and moved to the Los Angeles area as a small child, learning English from a tutor his parents hired. He picked up the bass at eight, playing Beatles and Rolling Stones songs with his older brother. King had already played with him in an earlier band. Dave Lombardo was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1965 and grew up in South Gate. At sixteen he heard that a guitarist named Kerry King lived a few blocks away, so he simply knocked on the door and introduced himself. Within weeks all four were rehearsing in Lombardo's garage.[1] [2] [3]

At first they were a covers band, playing Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath and Venom at parties and small clubs. Kerrang dates their very first show to Halloween night 1981, at the Southgate Park Auditorium. The early image leaned hard on Satanic theatre, with pentagrams, spikes, inverted crosses and makeup. Lombardo later explained the thinking. Slayer would be everything Hollywood was not. No pretty boys and no party songs, just the devil. Lombardo also cut the band's logo, imagining how a killer would carve it with a knife. Because he is left handed, the letters ended up leaning to the right, and they have leaned that way ever since.[1] [2] [3]

Their big break came in 1983. Slayer opened for the band Bitch at the Woodstock club in Anaheim, and in the crowd was Brian Slagel, a former music journalist who had just started a label called Metal Blade. The year before, his Metal Massacre compilation had given Metallica their first release. Slagel met the band backstage and asked for an original song for Metal Massacre three. They gave him Aggressive Perfector, and it caused a buzz in the underground tape trading scene. Tom Araya later said the band had written earlier songs in the style of the Scorpions and Iron Maiden, but after rehearsing Aggressive Perfector so hard, they left that softer material behind for good.[1] [2] [3]

The Metal Blade years

Metal Blade offered a contract but had no money for a recording budget, so Slayer paid for their debut themselves. Tom Araya was working as a respiratory therapist, trained to draw blood and put tubes down patients' throats, and his savings went into the record, along with a loan from Kerry King's father. They recorded in November 1983 and Show No Mercy was in shops the following month. Critics were split. One British reviewer called it junk, while Metal Forces called it one of the fastest and heaviest albums ever made. It still became Metal Blade's biggest seller, eventually passing forty thousand copies around the world, when five thousand was a normal result for the label.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In February 1984 the band had its first scare. Dave Mustaine, freshly fired from Metallica, invited King to play guitar in his new band Megadeth, and King did a handful of shows with him. Hanneman assumed Slayer would need a new guitarist. But King went back, saying Megadeth was taking too much of his time, and the episode left a long running coolness between the two camps. That summer Slayer released the Haunting the Chapel EP, darker and faster than the album. Then they set out on their first national tour in Araya's Camaro, towing a U Haul trailer, with Araya's teenage brother Johnny working as their roadie. Araya's hospital job did not survive it. When his employer threatened to fire him for missing shifts, he replied that he guessed he was fired.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The second album, Hell Awaits, arrived in April 1985, and this time Metal Blade paid for the studio. Producer Ron Fair, who usually worked with pop acts, took one look at the band and remarked how angry they were. The record was longer and more complex than anything they had done, influenced by King and Hanneman's love of Mercyful Fate, and it opened with a demonic voice recorded backwards. Metal Forces readers voted Slayer best band, best live band and best album of 1985, and Lombardo best drummer. On the road that year they toured with Venom and the Bay Area band Exodus. Exodus guitarist Gary Holt remembered it as two bands of friends playing with one band of heroes. Nobody could guess that Holt would one day join Slayer.[1] [2] [3]

That Combat tour produced one of the band's most notorious stories. Riding on Venom's tour bus, the first one Slayer had ever been on, everyone got drunk. A very drunk Tom Araya asked where the toilet was, and Venom singer Cronos joked that he could use his mouth. Araya took him almost literally and urinated on his hair. Cronos punched him, and Araya finished the tour with a black eye. He has since said only that he was drunk and it was a disrespectful thing to do. Araya has also admitted that he and Hanneman used a lot of cocaine in those early years. The two of them made a pact to quit around the time of South of Heaven, and he now calls that period plain stupid.[1] [2]

Reign in Blood

By 1986 Slayer had outgrown Metal Blade, and the most unlikely suitor won them. Rick Rubin had co founded Def Jam Records, and was famous for producing Run DMC, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys. Hanneman was impressed rather than put off, and Rubin persuaded the band that they would be a priority for his label. It was Rubin's first work with a metal band, and he turned their sound inside out. At Hit City West in Los Angeles, with engineer Andy Wallace, he stripped away the reverb that had blurred their earlier records. Rubin said fast music with big sounds just becomes a blur, and he wanted a pulse. King said you could suddenly hear that they were not just playing fast but playing in time.[1] [2] [3]

The songs were short and savage, closer in structure to hardcore punk than to heavy metal, and the band only noticed how short when they were finishing the mix. Ten songs came to about twenty nine minutes. They asked Rubin whether they needed more material. He said ten songs with verses, choruses and solos was an album, and that was that. The whole thing fit on one side of a cassette, which King loved, because you could flip the tape and play it again. The record opens with Angel of Death and closes with Raining Blood, two songs written by Hanneman that would open and close Slayer concerts for the rest of their career.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Angel of Death is about Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who carried out experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz. Hanneman had bought two books about him on tour and said the song was like a history lesson. But the lyrics describe the atrocities in cold detail without condemning them, and Columbia Records, which distributed Def Jam, refused to release the album. It finally came out through Geffen in October 1986, and even then Geffen kept it off its official release schedule and left its logo off the sleeve. Holocaust survivors and their families were outraged, and accusations of Nazi sympathy followed the band for years. Hanneman, who collected German war medals, insisted that it should be obvious Mengele was evil, and that he shouldn't have to say so.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Reign in Blood got almost no radio play, yet it became Slayer's first album on the Billboard 200, peaking at number ninety four, and it eventually went gold. Kerrang later called it the heaviest album of all time, and Metal Hammer named it the best metal album of the previous twenty years. It set the template for death metal and much of the extreme music that followed. Kerry King always played down the mystique. He said that if Reign in Blood were released today nobody would care, and that it was all about timing, and nobody in thrash having heard a record produced that well. Hanneman simply called it his favourite, because it was so short, quick and to the point.[1] [2] [3]

Success did not mean money. Barely a month into a support tour with W.A.S.P. in late 1986, Dave Lombardo quit. He said he wasn't getting paid, and if they were professionals on a major label he wanted his rent and utilities covered. Tony Scaglione of the New Jersey band Whiplash filled in. Rubin was unhappy and called Lombardo almost every day, eventually offering him a salary. Lombardo's wife talked him into returning in 1987, and Rubin drove to his house and took him to rehearsal in his Porsche. Rubin also insisted Slayer record Iron Butterfly's In A Gadda Da Vida for the film Less than Zero. The band hated it, but it was one of their first songs to reach the radio.[1] [2] [3] [4]

South of Heaven and Seasons in the Abyss

Knowing they could never top Reign in Blood for speed, Slayer did the opposite. It was the only album the band ever discussed before writing, Hanneman said, and they agreed to slow down. South of Heaven, released in July 1988, had slower tempos, clean guitar passages and more actual singing from Araya. Some fans were baffled, and Rolling Stone dismissed it as offensive satanic drivel, although the same magazine later ranked it among the greatest metal albums ever. King called it his weakest performance. He had just married and moved to Phoenix, Arizona, and felt like the odd man out. Still, it charted at number fifty seven and went gold, and its title track became a permanent concert opener.[1] [2] [3]

Behind the scenes, Rick Rubin split from his Def Jam partner Russell Simmons and started a new label, Def American, taking Slayer with him. Their first album there, Seasons in the Abyss, came out on the ninth of October 1990. It blended the speed of Reign in Blood with the grooves of South of Heaven, and many fans consider it the band's most complete record. The lyrics moved from hell to horrors on earth, including war in War Ensemble and the killer Ed Gein in Dead Skin Mask. It reached number forty on the Billboard 200 and gave Slayer their first music video, for the title track, filmed in front of the pyramids at Giza in Egypt.[1] [2] [3]

To promote it, Slayer joined Megadeth for the Clash of the Titans tour, one of the most successful package tours in metal history. The European leg in 1990 featured Testament and Suicidal Tendencies. In 1991 the North American leg added Anthrax as a third headliner, with a young Seattle band called Alice in Chains opening. Metallica, about to release their Black Album, were the only member of the so called Big Four missing. King said he knew they wouldn't take part because they didn't need the others. Rolling Stone described fans at the opening night in Dallas building bonfires on the lawn and dancing around them. Slayer then marked ten years together with a double live album, Decade of Aggression, in 1991.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In May 1992 Dave Lombardo left again. He had tension with the others, and he had told them early in his wife's pregnancy that he would not tour during the two weeks around the birth. When manager Rick Sales called to say a festival had been booked for that very period, Lombardo refused to budge, and he was out. He went on to form the band Grip Inc. and later worked with Mike Patton in Fantômas. Slayer had to find a drummer who could play some of the fastest parts in metal, and a fill in who kept making mistakes was not the answer. After hundreds of demo tapes and auditions, they found their man in the San Francisco Bay Area.[1] [2] [3]

The Bostaph years

Paul Bostaph had played with the Bay Area thrash band Forbidden since 1985. He quit that band in 1992, and by coincidence got a call about auditioning for Slayer the very next day. He was recommended by King's guitar technician. Slayer tested him on nine songs and he made only one mistake, on Angel of Death, because he couldn't tell from live tapes how many times a riff repeated. His approach was to play every song exactly as Lombardo had, because as a fan that's what he would want to hear. He debuted at the Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington in 1992, and his first recording with the band was a punk medley with the rapper Ice T for the Judgment Night soundtrack.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Divine Intervention arrived in September 1994, nearly four years after Seasons, and went straight in at number eight, Slayer's best chart position up to that point, selling ninety three thousand copies in its first week. Araya had been watching the news and reading true crime, and the songs covered the Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich and the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Araya said one label executive told them they needed a hit song. The band replied that the executive could write one and they'd record it. That was the last such meeting they ever had. In 1996 came Undisputed Attitude, a set of covers of the punk and hardcore bands that had shaped them, plus two songs Hanneman wrote in the mid eighties for a side project called Pap Smear.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Undisputed Attitude brought one of the band's ugliest controversies. On their cover of Minor Threat's song Guilty of Being White, Slayer changed the last line so that the word white became right. Minor Threat's Ian MacKaye, who wrote the song, said he found that deeply offensive. King said it was a tongue in cheek joke, made because he thought accusations of racism against the band were ridiculous. The lineup was shifting too. Bostaph left in 1996 to work on his own project, and the band recruited Jon Dette from Testament for a headlining slot on Ozzfest. Dette lasted about a year before he was fired after falling out with the others, and Bostaph returned in 1997.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A murder, a lawsuit and the devil in music

The darkest chapter in Slayer's history had nothing to do with the band's actions. On the twenty second of July 1995, in San Luis Obispo County, California, three teenage boys, Royce Casey, Jacob Delashmutt and Joseph Fiorella, lured their fifteen year old classmate Elyse Pahler to a eucalyptus grove and stabbed her to death as what they called a sacrifice to the devil. They had formed a metal band and believed the killing would make them play better. All three were convicted. Delashmutt later told the Washington Post that the music was destructive, but that Elyse died because Fiorella was obsessed with her and with killing her. Her parents, David and Lisanne Pahler, then sued Slayer.[1] [2] [3]

The Pahlers claimed that Slayer's lyrics had given the killers detailed instructions, and that the band and its business partners marketed harmful material to teenagers. The lawsuit was filed in 1996 but held back until the criminal trials were over. In 2001 a judge threw it out, citing free speech and the fact that nobody could have foreseen the crime. One ruling asked where the line would be drawn, suggesting you might as well start going through every book in the library. The family tried again, claiming the band knowingly distributed harmful material to minors. Judge E. Jeffrey Burke dismissed that case too, saying he did not consider Slayer's music obscene, indecent or harmful to minors.[1] [2] [3]

Diabolus in Musica, Latin for the devil in music, was named after the tritone, a dissonant interval that medieval church musicians avoided. It was finished in 1997 but delayed nine months when Columbia took over distribution of American Recordings, finally appearing in June 1998. Its downtuned guitars and churning grooves drew comparisons with the nu metal bands then ruling the charts. King later said he was so bitter about popular music at the time that he barely paid attention, and called it his least favourite Slayer album. Bostaph and Araya, by contrast, have both defended it. Its follow up, God Hates Us All, was recorded in a Vancouver studio owned by Bryan Adams, and was released by pure coincidence on the eleventh of September 2001.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The original four, together again

God Hates Us All earned Slayer their first Grammy nomination, for the song Disciple, though Tool won that year. Before Christmas 2001, Paul Bostaph left, citing a chronic elbow injury, and with a European tour unfinished, the band asked Dave Lombardo if he would help out. His first show back was at Toad's Place in New Haven, Connecticut, on the twenty fourth of January 2002. The band then auditioned hundreds of hopefuls from fan videos, but could not find anyone who fit, so Lombardo stayed. King had doubted whether he still had it, but was blown away in rehearsals. In 2004, when Lars Ulrich was taken ill before Metallica's Download Festival set, Lombardo even sat in for him on two songs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

With Lombardo back, Slayer leaned into their legend. In 2003 and 2004 they played Reign in Blood from start to finish on the Still Reigning tour. During the closing song, Raining Blood, stage blood poured down on the band until they were soaked, and a concert in Augusta, Maine, in July 2004 was filmed for a DVD. They also released a box set called Soundtrack to the Apocalypse, a name first considered for the 2001 album. Kerry King, it turned out, had kept five large storage boxes of memorabilia and around seventy home videos going back to 1983. Between 2002 and 2004 the band played more than two hundred and fifty shows, headlining festivals including Ozzfest.[1] [2] [3]

Christ Illusion, the first album by all four original members since 1990, was meant to come out on the sixth of June 2006, six six six. The plan fell through, but it arrived that August and debuted at number five in America, their highest chart position yet. It was also their most controversial record in years. The cover, by Reign in Blood artist Larry Carroll, showed a mutilated Christ in a sea of blood, and Christian groups in Mumbai protested. EMI India recalled the album and in October 2006 announced that every copy had been destroyed. In Fullerton, California, officials had seventeen bus bench adverts removed, and the song Jihad, told from the point of view of a September eleventh hijacker, angered victims' families.[1] [2]

That same album finally brought Slayer mainstream recognition. Araya had picked up a copy of Texas Monthly in an airport, with a feature about soldiers returning from Iraq, and woke in the middle of the night to write the lyrics to Eyes of the Insane, about a soldier's post traumatic stress. The song won the Grammy for Best Metal Performance in February 2007, and a year later Final Six won the same award. The band missed the first ceremony because they were on tour. King, typically, said he didn't care, but that winning with the kind of material they wrote would be the coolest thing. Soon after, Slayer made their first network television appearance, on Jimmy Kimmel Live.[1] [2] [3]

World Painted Blood followed in November 2009. For once the band wrote much of it in the studio, with producer Greg Fidelman, and Hanneman contributed most of the songs, with a punk energy that pleased Lombardo. It would be the last album by the original line up, and the last with Rick Rubin, who had been involved in some way on every record since 1986. Around the same time, years of violent headbanging caught up with Araya. In early 2010 he had surgery on his neck, with a metal plate and six screws, and tour dates were cancelled. He has said he still desperately wants to headbang on stage, but never can again. On the sixteenth of June 2010, in Warsaw, the Big Four finally shared a bill.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Losing Jeff Hanneman

Early in 2011, Jeff Hanneman was relaxing in a friend's hot tub near Los Angeles when he felt something like a bite or a prick on his arm. He thought nothing of it. About a week later he came home drunk and reluctantly showed his wife Kathryn his arm. It was bright red and three times its normal size. She begged him to go to the emergency room, but he only wanted to sleep. The next morning she drove him to hospital in Loma Linda, where doctors diagnosed necrotizing fasciitis, a flesh eating infection. He was warned he might lose the arm, and Kathryn was told he might not survive. He was placed in a medically induced coma and had major surgery and skin grafts.[1] [2] [3]

Slayer had tour dates booked, including the Soundwave festival in Australia, so in February 2011 they called in Gary Holt of Exodus, the man who had once been starstruck touring with them. When Holt had Exodus commitments, Pat O'Brien of Cannibal Corpse filled in. On the twenty third of April 2011, at the Big Four concert in Indio, California, the first time Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax and Slayer played together on American soil, Hanneman walked on for the final two songs, South of Heaven and Angel of Death. Kerrang reported that he cut the sleeve off his shirt so everyone could see the terrible wound. It was the last time he ever played live with Slayer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Hanneman never got his strength back. His wife said he refused rehab and therapy, believing that playing at rehearsal would be enough. When he found he couldn't play at his old speed, it hit him hard and he started to lose hope. Meanwhile the band tried to make a new album without him. Then, in February 2013, just before the Australian tour, Dave Lombardo was out for a third time. The band said he had turned up with a completely new set of pay terms shortly before departure. Lombardo claimed he was gagged from telling his side. Jon Dette filled in for the Australian dates, and by May, Paul Bostaph was back in the drum seat for good.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the second of May 2013, Jeff Hanneman died of liver failure at Hemet Valley Medical Center, near his home in Southern California's Inland Empire. He was forty nine. A week later the band announced the cause, alcohol related cirrhosis of the liver, and said that neither Jeff nor those close to him knew how bad his condition was until his final days. It had seemed he was improving and looking forward to a new record. Araya called him a lifeline of Slayer, who wrote the songs the band would always be known for. King remembered the two of them as the night owls on the tour bus, staying up talking and watching movies. His riffs had shaped a whole genre.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Repentless and the farewell

King was determined to carry on. Araya was less sure, saying that after thirty years it would be like starting over, and wondering whether fans would accept it. In the end Gary Holt became a full member, though King did not let him write, saying fans were not ready for it. In April 2014 the band surprised the Revolver Golden Gods ceremony by playing a new song, Implode, and announced a deal with the German label Nuclear Blast. Repentless, produced by Terry Date, came out on the eleventh of September 2015 and debuted at number four in America, their highest ever. One song, Piano Wire, carried a writing credit for Hanneman, and King said the title track imagined the band's life through Jeff's eyes.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band toured Repentless for two and a half years, and King said there was already half another album recorded. Instead, on the twenty second of January 2018, Slayer announced a final world tour. The band never gave an official reason. Araya had spoken about the toll touring took on his family, and King later told Rolling Stone that Araya had told him in 2018 that he was done. The tour began in May 2018 with Lamb of God, Anthrax, Behemoth and Testament, and eventually ran to around one hundred and fifty shows across North and South America, Europe, Australia and Japan. In December 2018, Holt missed several shows to be with his dying father, and Phil Demmel filled in.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

There was confusion about what the farewell really meant. Manager Rick Sales insisted the band was not breaking up, only stopping touring. But two days after the last show, King's wife Ayesha posted that there was not a chance in hell of Slayer ever reuniting. The very last concert took place at the Forum in Los Angeles, their home town, on the thirtieth of November 2019. The band and crew hugged and posed for photos, Araya said goodbye to the fans, and Holt thanked them for welcoming him since 2011. Dave Lombardo did not attend. After thirty eight years, twelve studio albums, five Grammy nominations and two wins, Slayer walked away.[1] [2]

Slayer's influence is hard to overstate. MTV said their music was directly responsible for the rise of death metal, and musicians from Sepultura, Death, Cannibal Corpse, Slipknot and System of a Down have said they would not exist without them. Sepultura's Andreas Kisser put it plainly, saying Sepultura would never have been possible without Slayer. Between 1991 and 2013 they sold close to five million albums in the United States alone, and four of their albums went gold. Lombardo's use of two separate bass drums, rather than a double pedal, earned him the nickname the godfather of double bass. Rick Rubin said Slayer belonged to a small group of artists who follow their own truth, untouched by anything else going on around them.[1] [2] [3]

After the end

After the farewell tour, the members scattered. Tom Araya went home to his ranch in Texas, where he and his wife Sandra raise cattle, and for several years he gave no interviews at all. Gary Holt went back to Exodus. Dave Lombardo kept playing with Suicidal Tendencies, Dead Cross, Mr. Bungle and the Misfits. Kerry King was the most restless. He admitted in 2021 that Slayer had quit too early and that he hated not playing. With Paul Bostaph, Death Angel singer Mark Osegueda, guitarist Phil Demmel and bassist Kyle Sanders, he made his first solo album, From Hell I Rise, released on the seventeenth of May 2024. Rolling Stone later ranked it the best metal album of the year.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In early 2024 King told Rolling Stone that a Slayer reunion was unlikely, that he had not spoken to Araya since the last show, and that he had cut off Dave Lombardo entirely. He blamed Lombardo's former lawyer, saying she thought Slayer had Metallica money, which they never did, and said the drummer was dead to him. Just weeks later, on the twenty first of February 2024, Slayer announced two festival shows. Araya said nothing compared with the ninety minutes on stage with the fans. The line up was the final one, Araya, King, Holt and Bostaph. They played Riot Fest in Chicago on the twenty second of September 2024, their first concert in almost five years.[1] [2] [3]

The second show, at Louder Than Life in Louisville, Kentucky, was cancelled when the storms of Hurricane Helene forced organisers to scrap the whole day. Slayer quickly added a headlining slot at the Aftershock festival in Sacramento on the tenth of October 2024, and Louisville ticket holders were offered the chance to see them there instead. King insisted it was just a fun celebration, not a return to recording or touring. But the shows kept coming. On the fifth of July 2025, Slayer played at Villa Park in Birmingham, England, at Back to the Beginning, Black Sabbath's final concert with Ozzy Osbourne, alongside Metallica, Guns N' Roses and Pantera. Araya called it an honour, remembering playing Sabbath records in high school.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

As of 2026, Slayer exist in an unusual state. They have not recorded new music since Repentless in 2015, and Gary Holt has said the reunion is decided year by year, with Exodus as his first family and Slayer as his second. Holt has also said there are no plans for new recordings or long tours. King has kept his solo band as his main priority. Yet the four men who closed the book in 2019 keep coming back to play the old songs, and the fortieth anniversary of Reign in Blood in 2026 has given fans another reason to celebrate the band. Whatever happens next, Slayer's place as the most extreme of thrash metal's Big Four is secure.[1] [2] [3]

The people around Slayer

Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman. The two teenagers who met at a 1981 audition built Slayer's guitar sound together, trading chaotic solos that one critic said were made for each other, because they would sound terrible in any other band. Hanneman wrote many of the most famous songs, while King took over more of the writing in later years. King remembered them as the night owls on the tour bus, and said Hanneman would have been super proud to play Black Sabbath's farewell.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tom Araya and Jeff Hanneman. Araya and Hanneman formed a lyric writing partnership that sometimes overshadowed King's input. They were also partners in excess, and Araya has admitted they used cocaine constantly in the early days before making a pact to quit around the time of South of Heaven. After Hanneman died, Araya called him a lifeline of Slayer, and he doubted the band could carry on without him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kerry King and Dave Lombardo. Lombardo knocked on King's door as a sixteen year old and helped start the band, and King once compared his natural talent to the baseball film The Natural. But Lombardo left three times, in 1986, 1992 and 2013, each time over money or family. After the last split King cut him off completely, calling him dead to him and blaming Lombardo's lawyer at the time. Lombardo skipped the band's final show.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kerry King and Tom Araya. The only two members present from the very beginning, King and Araya were opposites in belief. King is a fierce antitheist who writes against organised religion, while Araya is a practising Catholic who says Slayer's words never shake his faith. He even enjoys King's lyrics for the fact that they'll annoy people. After the farewell tour they did not speak for years, until the 2024 reunion brought them back on stage.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Slayer and Rick Rubin. Rubin signed Slayer to Def Jam, produced Reign in Blood, South of Heaven and Seasons in the Abyss, and took the band with him to Def American. He stayed involved as producer or executive producer until 2009. The relationship cooled. King felt Rubin had become too busy, and called his work on Metallica's Death Magnetic while Slayer waited a slap in the face. Rubin still praised Slayer as artists who follow their own truth.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Slayer and Brian Slagel. Slagel spotted Slayer at an Anaheim club in 1983, put them on the Metal Massacre compilation, released their first albums on his label Metal Blade and managed them for a time. When he saw they were outgrowing him, he negotiated their move to a major label, and paid Rick Rubin a personal tribute for his passion. In 2017 Kerry King inducted Slagel's label into the Hall of Heavy Metal History.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Kerry King and Dave Mustaine. King idolised Mustaine's playing in early Metallica and briefly played guitar in Mustaine's new band Megadeth in 1984, before choosing Slayer. The split fuelled a long running feud between the bands. They later co headlined the Clash of the Titans tour, and in 2010 King joined Megadeth on stage for the first time in twenty six years. King still calls Mustaine a great guitar player.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jeff Hanneman and Lemmy. Hanneman collected German Second World War medals, starting with some his father brought home, and his prize item was a Knight's Cross bought from a fan for a thousand dollars. While Slayer toured with Motörhead, he discovered that Lemmy shared the hobby, and the two spent time discussing medal designs, weapons and military tactics. The shared fascination fed accusations of Nazi sympathy that both men denied.[1] [2]

Gary Holt and Slayer. Holt first toured with Slayer in 1985 as a starstruck Exodus guitarist. In 2011 he stepped in for the ailing Hanneman and became a full member after Hanneman's death, playing every show until 2019 and the reunions since. He is close enough to Tom Araya that, as an ordained minister, he officiated Araya's vow renewal. He calls Exodus his first family and Slayer his second.[1] [2] [3]

Paul Bostaph and Dave Lombardo. Bostaph replaced Lombardo twice, in 1992 and again in 2013, and in between Lombardo replaced him. Bostaph had loved Lombardo's drumming as a fan, and deliberately copied his parts note for note so audiences would hear what they expected. Bostaph later became Kerry King's drummer in his solo band, while Lombardo moved on to Dead Cross, Mr. Bungle and the Misfits.[1] [2] [3]

Jeff Hanneman and Kathryn Hanneman. Jeff met Kathryn at a Slayer show in Buena Park, California, in 1983 and they married in Las Vegas in 1989. When his arm became infected in 2011 she forced him to hospital, and later spoke frankly to Guitar World about his drinking and his refusal to go to rehab or therapy, and how he lost hope when he couldn't play at his old speed.[1] [2]

Slayer and Ian MacKaye. The Minor Threat singer wrote Guilty of Being White, which Slayer covered on Undisputed Attitude in 1996. When Slayer changed the final line so it ended with the word right instead of white, MacKaye said it was deeply offensive to him. Kerry King defended it as tongue in cheek humour aimed at those who accused the band of racism.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Slayer

• Dave Lombardo designed the Slayer logo, and it leans to the right because he is left handed. Lombardo imagined how a murderer would carve the name with a knife. Being left handed, his letters slanted to the right by accident, and the band has used that slanted logo ever since.[1] [2]
• Tom Araya paid for Slayer's first album with his wages as a respiratory therapist. Araya had trained to draw blood and intubate patients. His savings, plus a loan from Kerry King's father, funded Show No Mercy in 1983, because Metal Blade had no recording budget.[1] [2]
• In October 1982 Slayer opened for Metallica at a club in Anaheim, while Dave Mustaine was still in Metallica. Kerrang dates the show to the twenty second of October 1982 at the Woodstock. King has said he watched Metallica there with Mustaine on guitar, before they moved to the Bay Area.[1] [2]
• Slayer used to wear eyeliner on stage until San Francisco fans shamed them out of it. At their first Bay Area show in January 1984, fans handed out paper towels and chanted for them to take off the makeup. The next night, playing with Exodus, they appeared without it.[1]
• Future Death drummer Gene Hoglan sang backing vocals on Slayer's first album. Hoglan suggested big gang shouts on Evil Has No Boundaries, and about eight people in the studio joined in. He later worked for the band and gave Lombardo tips on double bass drumming.[1] [2]
• The engineer on Haunting the Chapel was a Christian who feared he would go to hell for recording it. Bill Metoyer had no problem with the first album, but the anti religious lyrics Araya sang on the 1984 EP left him worried about his own soul.[1]
• On an early tour, Slayer played in San Antonio with another band also called Slayer. The Texan Slayer was playing its goodbye show that night, so the name clash sorted itself out.[1]
• The cover of Hell Awaits closely resembles a 1977 comic by the French artist Jean Giraud, also known as Moebius. Araya said the artwork was put together overnight. The likeness to a Heavy Metal magazine story went unnoticed until a blogger pointed it out in 2011.[1]
• The white line in a photo inside Hell Awaits is salt, not cocaine. Araya has said the picture, taken in Canada, was a joke meant to make people think it was real.[1]
• Kerry King played the guitar solo on the Beastie Boys' No Sleep till Brooklyn. Rick Rubin was producing Reign in Blood and Licensed to Ill at the same time and called King in. King also refused a video idea where a gorilla knocked him off stage, so he knocked the gorilla off instead.[1]
• Reign in Blood lasts about twenty nine minutes and fit on a single side of a cassette. King loved that you could listen, flip the tape over and play it again. When the band asked whether it was too short, Rubin said ten songs was an album.[1] [2]
• Reign in Blood's cover artist, Larry Carroll, was a political illustrator for The New York Times and the Village Voice. The band disliked the painting at first. King said nobody in the band wanted it, but Carroll went on to paint three more Slayer covers.[1]
• Public Enemy sampled Angel of Death on their 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. The half time riff appears on She Watch Channel Zero. KMFDM and the rap duo M.O.P. also sampled the song.[1]
• Angel of Death is cited as containing the only recorded use of the rare word abacinate. The reference book Foyle's Philavery, a collection of unusual words, notes the song's use of it.[1]
• Tori Amos recorded a haunting piano cover of Raining Blood in 2001. It appeared on Strange Little Girls. King said it took him a minute and a half to recognise the song, and the band sent her a box of Slayer T shirts.[1]
• A 2008 job advert for Guitar Hero testers required applicants to play Raining Blood on the hardest level. The song was already notorious as one of the most difficult in Guitar Hero three.[1]
• Raining Blood was the band's biggest selling song, with over two hundred thousand downloads by 2013. Billboard reported the figure of two hundred and five thousand after Hanneman's death.[1]
• The skull on the cover of South of Heaven was inspired by a real fossil of an early human found in Kenya. It was based on KNM ER 1470, a skull discovered in 1972 and assigned to the extinct species Homo rudolfensis.[1]
• The double vocal on Temptation happened by accident. Araya sang it once his way and once King's way. Both takes were played back together by mistake, King liked the result, and it stayed.[1]
• Tom Araya had never heard heavy metal before he joined Slayer. He grew up on Cream, Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane, and said that when King suggested songs to learn, he had no idea who Iron Maiden were.[1] [2]
• Tom Araya makes a guest appearance on Alice in Chains' 1992 album Dirt. Alice in Chains had opened for Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax on the 1991 Clash of the Titans tour.[1] [2]
• Araya's song 213 is named after Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment number. Araya had been reading about the British killer Dennis Nilsen, and when Dahmer's crimes hit the news he noticed parallels. He called the song a love song.[1] [2]
• Slayer once considered covering the Doors for their punk covers album. Araya named When the Music's Over or Five to One. Rubin suggested Black Flag's Rise Above, but the band couldn't work out an arrangement.[1]
• God Hates Us All was recorded in a Vancouver studio owned by Bryan Adams. The band moved there for cheaper studio time, decorated the room with candles, incense and a devil's head, and used seven string guitars for the first time.[1]
• The phrase God Hates Us All was first suggested as a T shirt slogan by a member of Pantera. King played them the song Disciple, one of them suggested the line for a shirt, and King decided it would work better as the album title.[1]
• Dave Lombardo filled in for Lars Ulrich on two songs at Metallica's 2004 Download Festival show. Ulrich had been taken to hospital. Lombardo played Battery and The Four Horsemen, and Slipknot's Joey Jordison drummed most of the rest.[1] [2]
• Slayer won their first Grammy while stuck on tour, and Araya celebrated from a hotel room in Columbus, Ohio. Eyes of the Insane won in February 2007. King later said it was one of the poorest representations of the band on the album.[1]
• The song Final Six won a Grammy but was left off Christ Illusion because Araya needed gall bladder surgery. He could not finish the vocals in time, so it surfaced on a 2007 special edition and still won Best Metal Performance.[1] [2]
• After his 2010 neck surgery, Tom Araya has a metal plate and six screws in his neck and can no longer headbang. Surgeons went in through the front of his neck. He has said it is a major bummer, because the music makes him want to headbang.[1] [2]
• Tom Araya holds a black belt in karate and runs a cattle ranch in Texas. He and his family began training in 2009 for self defence. The ranch has more than sixty head of cattle.[1]
• Kerry King breeds snakes and owns a reptile business called Psychotic Exotics. He is an avid snake collector. In the late eighties, living in Phoenix, he was also a neighbour of Judas Priest singer Rob Halford.[1]
• Paul Bostaph got the call to audition for Slayer the day after he quit Forbidden. He made just one mistake in nine test songs, on Angel of Death, because he couldn't count a riff's repeats from live recordings.[1] [2]
• Gary Holt recorded all his guitar solos for Repentless in a single day, with a six pack of beer. He sat in the studio with King and producer Terry Date. Araya walked in and told him the first take of one solo had been perfect.[1]
• Gary Holt is an ordained minister and officiated Tom Araya's wedding vow renewal. Holt is also an atheist and a vegan, and he stopped drinking alcohol in 2021.[1]
• Hanneman's hardcore punk side project, Pap Smear, was abandoned on Rick Rubin's advice. Rubin told him side projects break bands up. Two of its songs were finally recorded by Slayer on Undisputed Attitude in 1996.[1] [2]
• Kerry King says God Hates Us All was recorded in nine days, apart from the vocals, which took three months. He contrasted it with his solo album, where the drums were done in five days and he recorded eighteen solos in one day.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.