For over four decades, I was terrified of Slayer. This isn’t terribly surprising because Slayer is Slayer and, more important, I was a child of the 1980s. We 80ennials were taught to fear many things: strangers with candy, masked serial killers, drugs, drug dealers, and hot sex. Anything in the cultural firmament that wasn’t a rerun of Happy Days could corrupt your innocence permanently.
Popular music wasn’t immune to this cultural puritanism. The Tipper Gores of the country were barnstorming the media throughout that whole decade, warning American families that Ozzy Osbourne was biting the heads off of bats, that Judas Priest was encouraging kids to commit suicide, and that Madonna was dry-humping award show stages. These artists were poisoning young minds, and something had to be done to prevent it. Perhaps a very small warning label on every album cover would do the trick.
All of this was political theater, of course, and all of the artists implicated were wholly innocent. They were artists. They were joking around, usually while high as balls. And if that pissed off the old folks, that only made them cooler. So I was in on the joke. I was with the bat-eaters.
Except for Slayer. Slayer wasn’t joking. Slayer was serious, dangerously so. Does this sound like the voice of a man who’s just having a laugh to you?
It does not. That’s lead singer/bassist Tom Araya welcoming listeners to the band’s landmark 1986 album, Reign in Blood. Reign in Blood represents the unofficial birth of speed metal, with Slayer taking the principles of new wave of British heavy metal (pioneered by the likes of Priest and Iron Maiden) and stripping away their more operatic elements, leaving only the menace. No song on Slayer’s masterpiece runs longer than five minutes, and only two of the songs run longer than three. The result plays out like a trauma, leaving the listener with scant time to process what’s happening to them before the next assault comes swooping in.
I couldn’t process it, save for Araya’s screaming. I got the gist of that real fast, and my inner child always shrank away from it. You’re talking about a kid who had to change the channel whenever Ozzy’s “Shot in the Dark” video came on MTV, because it scared the shit out of him. Also, Slayer kids at my school used to carve shit into their arms, which freaked me the fuck out. Justice-era Metallica was as dark as I could go back then, and that remained the upper boundary of my metal tolerance well into adulthood, even if I knew that Slayer was respected, and even if I knew there had to be a reason why. I couldn’t get past Araya screaming so convincingly, like his arms were being torn off his body. So I kept inventing music snob excuses to leave Slayer out of my rotation: That’s not real singing, these songs are all the same flavor of white noise, they may as well have Nigel Tufnel on guitar, etc. I wasn’t about to consider them a grower band alongside the likes of peak Metallica. Slayer was too stupid to deserve that.
And yet, I kept wondering about them. Every time I tried to make my way through Reign in Blood, it never caught on save for Araya’s brute-force chorus to opening number “Angel of Death.” I kept hearing him sing—hiss, really—Monarch to the kingdom of the dead in my mind, over and over again. A mental scab I couldn’t help but pick at. I knew there was more there if I was brave enough to keep listening.
This was right around a time when I had grown tired of both my everyday workout playlist and, more important, a world where everyone—every artist, every fan, every politician, every fucking brand—is in on every joke. That in-humor was cooler in the '80s, when it felt confined to the Ozzys of the world and not to Elon fucking Musk. I began to crave sincerity, and not of the Ted Lasso variety. I wanted people who said what they meant and meant what they said. And I wanted them to do it fast, angry, and real fucking loud. Guess which band ticks off those boxes?
That’s a real band playing in that clip. Perhaps the realest band that ever existed. Slayer has no interest in joking around, or in making things easy … especially for themselves. Look how hard Araya is banging his head in this clip. This man has amassed more career injuries than Matthew Stafford, he’s rocked so hard. Look how fast guitarists Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman (who died from alcoholism in 2013) are playing without missing a note. And look at drummer Dave Lombardo managing to keep time even though any other human would need eight arms to do it. This is real music, played by a group of men who may as well be considered elite athletes, given the speed and dexterity required to play it.
And Slayer never gave their tired limbs a rest. They played every song at 600 mph and, tenuously reunited after a nasty estrangement at the beginning of this decade, still do. They never recorded their own power ballad to give newcomers a welcome on-ramp to the rest of their discography. They never slowed down the tempo unless they were planning to speed it back up again 15 seconds later. They never expressed lyrical interest in anything other than pain, death, and bloodcurdling screams. This is music that, perhaps more than any other, echoes the ugly realities of human existence. You meet Slayer on their level, which was the seventh circle of hell, or you fuck off back to the cupcake factory.
I have stopped fucking off. I spun Reign in Blood until it finally took root, and then moved onto Slayer’s two subsequent albums (South of Heaven, Seasons in the Abyss). Once I did, HEY PRESTO would you look at that? I had found myself a new (to me) band! A real band, of real artists whose intolerance for bullshit very much matched my own. Slayer brooks no compromise, they show no mercy, and they have little interest in prettying over the truth of things. They want blood, and they want to make that blood rain. I'm not afraid of them anymore. In 2025, Slayer turns out to be just the band that I, and maybe the rest of the world, needed.
