Slayer are back! Sort of. While their retirement hasn't been revoked completely, the fact remains that one of thrash metal's most iconic bands are back where they belong; on stages thrilling thousands of metalheads every night.
To celebrate that fact, we've unearthed the 20 greatest Slayer songs of all time - and the stories behind them - to create the ultimate guide to one of thrash metal's fiercest champions.
Die By The Sword (Show No Mercy, 1983)
Slayer’s debut album, Show No Mercy, kicked off with malicious heavy metal intent via opening song Evil Has No Boundaries, but by the third track they were already mixing things up. Die By The Sword was where Slayer eased their foot off Show No Mercy’s accelerator and allowed their influences to come to the surface.
In three and a half minutes, it revealed how this newfangled thrash business was a conglomerate incorporation of 70s hard rock like UFO and Black Sabbath, West Coast punks Dead Kennedys and Suicidal Tendencies, and parallel thrash metal contemporaries such as Exodus.
The song also acted as an introduction and blueprint for the chromatic, half-stepping, creepycrawling riff sequence that the band were still exploiting at points until the very end. Argue among yourselves about who integrated hardcore punk into thrash first, but Die By The Sword proves that Slayer did it darker and more malevolently than anyone else. KSP
Black Magic (Show No Mercy, 1983)
Kerry King has never been shy about saying Show No Mercy is filled with “fucking Iron Maiden here and there”. And that Maiden worship is never more evident than on Black Magic, a song the guitarist wrote from top to bottom. Just listen to the main riff’s inky bounce and that classic middle eight – not even Steve Harris would be able to deny it.
Black Magic is the sound of a young band attempting to cultivate an image and, as Tom Araya told westworld.com, “trying to scare people on purpose”. It worked – it plugged into the so-called ‘Satanic panic’ then starting to bubble over, setting them on the path to becoming thrash’s premier controversy magnets.
Black Magic remains Metal Blade boss Brian Slagel’s favourite early Slayer song: “That riff is just iconic, and I love the slow build-up. It’s one of those songs where everything works; the vocals are great, the lyrics are cool." KSP
Chemical Warfare (Haunting The Chapel, 1984)
Chemical Warfare was a turning point in the Slayer timeline. Not only did it offer increased velocity, aggression and dissonant soloing, there was a topical shift from Satan to real-life horror. And it also marked the point where Dave Lombardo first displayed his double bass skill (though he tried the tactic on the Show No Mercy demos) – something that might not have happened were it not for Dark Angel drummer and Slayer fan, Gene Hoglan.
Recalled Gene to Decibel magazine: “The drum room had no carpet. Dave had to set up on the concrete and during the first few takes, the kit was going all over the place. So he was like, ‘Do you mind holding the kit together?’ I remember looking up through the drumheads, thinking, ‘I hope he does this in one or two takes, because this is rough.’”
“Gene wasn’t just holding my kit together,” Dave said. “He was coaching me. He was an amazing double-bass player even back then. He really helped me out.” CC
Hell Awaits (Hell Awaits, 1985)
After Show No Mercy established Slayer as Metal Blade’s biggest-selling act, they were rewarded with a modest budget for follow-up Hell Awaits. The sound was still ramshackle by modern standards, but their snarling vision was given sharper claws with ever-improving songwriting and production. The album’s title track was the perfect opener, soundtracking the descent into the inferno with a suitably hellish backmasked intro and an evilly chugging riff that went on for an age before exploding into thrashing fury.
Speaking to The Quietus, Tom Araya recalled: “We were all around the microphone doing all kinds of growling noises. Then we thought we should back-track. Also, because it was our second album, we thought of ‘Welcome back, join us!’ backwards. When we heard it played back, we thought that it sounded like they were saying ‘Slayer’. It was unintentional, but shit like that happens in this band.” PT
Angel Of Death (Reign In Blood, 1986)
If Slayer’s Reign In Blood is the greatest thrash album ever made, then its opening track is the most perfect thrash song ever written. A cold-eyed dissection of humanity’s capacity for unimaginable cruelty parcelled up in four minutes and 51 seconds of viciousness, this was Slayer’s grand statement of intent.
From Tom Araya’s immortal opening scream to those writhing, shrieking guitar solos, it’s a Hieronymus Bosch painting brought to life. It was also the longest track on Reign In Blood, though it didn’t feel like it, thanks to a combination of the band’s perfect performance and studio guru Rick Rubin’s surgical production.
The controversy around the lyrics – about monstrous Auschwitz surgeon Josef Mengele – briefly overshadowed it, but today it sounds like the pivot on which the whole of thrash metal turned. DE
Altar Of Sacrifice (Reign In Blood, 1986)
If there’s a song that greatly benefited from the production job bestowed upon Reign In Blood by producer Rick Rubin and engineer Andy Wallace, it’s Altar Of Sacrifice, with its extreme athleticism. The production on previous albums was “Not up to par,” lamented Tom Araya to Decibel.
To address this, Rubin and Wallace hollowed out the guitars and subtracted drum reverb, to create a sonic quality that was simultaneously cleaner while standing on the precipice of a violent brass-knuckling to the face.
All this perfectly suited the remarkably precise riff-pedalling, tritone fret-walks and Dave Lombardo’s relentless battery and almost disco-influenced cymbal clinking. Kerry King was later to remark about the song: “It was like, ‘Wow – you can hear everything, and those guys aren’t just playing fast. Those notes are on time.’” KSP
Postmortem (Reign In Blood, 1986)
Being bookended by two of the genre’s most recognisable moments – Angel Of Death and Raining Blood – means folks often forget the other 20 minutes of this banging album are littered with classic moments. Beyond being a segue into the renowned closer, Postmortem was one of those moments, due in large part to the band’s songwriting philosophy going into the album.
On numerous occasions Jeff Hanneman stated that, while they enjoyed recent works by Metallica and Megadeth, the band were finding the repetition of guitar riffs tiring. “If we do a verse two or three times, we’re already bored with it. We weren’t trying to make the songs shorter – that’s just what we were into.”
Postmortem lived up to that, cramming two distinct tempo and picking-style workouts into its terse three minutes and 27 seconds, with the ‘Do you wanna die?’ lyric enduring as an unlikely live yell-along. KSP
Raining Blood (Reign In Blood, 1986)
Angel Of Death might have made Slayer infamous, but it was Raining Blood that cemented them as thrash metal greats. From its simple, ominous opening beat to a riff that owes more than a passing nod to In The Hall Of The Mountain King, Raining Blood clawed its way out of the underground to be played at sporting events worldwide, and has been covered by everyone from Body Count to Tori Amos.
Even more astonishing is that it was pulled together as a last-minute addition, Kerry King admitting to Hammer he wrote the apocalyptic lyrics in “the studio lobby”. Discussing the iconic riff, guitarist Jeff Hanneman attributed the song’s success to its simplicity: “It just sticks in your head,” he told Revolver. “It embeds itself in your brain, and you sing it in your head all day and the only cure is to play the song again.” RH
South Of Heaven (South Of Heaven, 1988)
South Of Heaven’s opening title track –released as an advance promo single before the album – represented a concertedly bold new direction for a band who’d made their name as metal’s most repentless aggressors. The title was our first warning, God’s kingdom getting a controversial namecheck after five years of praising Hell.
“South Of Heaven is about Hell on Earth,” explained Tom Araya on the 1989 BBC documentary Arena: Heavy Metal. “It’s how I envision the world. I’m not saying there’s not hope, I’m just telling you what it looks like to me. There’s chaos everywhere, everyone’s fighting.”
In the decades since they released this gimlet-eyed view of the deterioration of civilisation and impending societal collapse, things have got even worse, to the point where the singer has withdrawn to his Texas ranch bolthole. Yet for all the song’s apocalyptic imagery, the frontman’s dark humour and movie buff credentials are revealed in the delightful line ‘Bastard sons begat your cunting daughters’, the last two words so memorably used by demon Pazuzu in 1973 horror classic The Exorcist.
At the time, many het-up thrashers were aghast at the slow, deliberate tempo and Tom’s attempt at clean vocals (“I still sing like a pig, I’m just not being tortured,” Tom joked), but South Of Heaven quickly settled in as a live favourite, building, brooding and grooving like no other Slayer song, with its creepy-crawl chords and sinister chromatic progressions. Jeff’s closing solo bleeds into a solid half-minute of masterfully controlled, high-tension feedback, building suspense until being broken off by Silent Scream, a song that proved far more instantly palatable to the diehard speed demons. CC
Silent Scream (South Of Heaven, 1988)
With that ravaging, Mephistophelean verse riff, lyrical extremity (‘Death is fucking you insane’) and Dave’s joyously octopoid fills, Silent Scream provided an acidic corrective to any misconceptions about Slayer ‘going soft’. Lines such as ‘Sacrifice the unborn,’ plus the fact that Tom Araya was raised Catholic, sparked speculation that it was an anti-abortion song, but the frontman told Metal Hammer in 1988 that the opposite was true.
“If you don’t have abortion you’re going to have a lot of abused kids,” he said, before emphatically adding: “I just think people should have the right to choose.”
Jeff concurred with Tom’s assessment, although his reasons weren’t necessarily rooted in the same principles. “I think banning abortion is ridiculous,” said the guitarist. “I would have about three kids by now!” CC
Mandatory Suicide (South Of Heaven, 1988)
Long before they entered the studio to record South Of Heaven, Slayer themselves knew they weren’t going to be able to top Reign In Blood for speed. The guitarists’ forearms were burning, Tom Araya’s vocal cords felt like someone had taken a razor to them, and Dave Lombardo’s limbs were exhausted after a year-plus on the road.
“We had to slow down,” Jeff Hanneman said. “We knew whatever we did was gonna be compared to Reign In Blood, and I remember we actually discussed slowing down.”
Mandatory Suicide greatly benefitted from this ethos, with its martial, four-on-the-floor pacing, spoken-word vocal daggers and guitars that mimicked the sound of tanks rumbling over the horizon. It became an album standout, both for its haunting pace and as a demonstration of how their songwriting acumen had as many different forms as their expression of evil. KSP
Ghosts Of War (South Of Heaven, 1988)
A rare example of a Slayer song sequel, Ghosts Of War revisited the toxic battlefields of 1984’s much-loved Chemical Warfare. As Tom Araya told Metal Hammer in 1988, Kerry’s lyrics concern “an army killed by chemicals, and in their agony and pain they seek revenge, so in their death, they come back to life… They want their dignity and self-respect.”
The earlier song’s climactic rampage was reprised in Ghosts Of War’s distant, lo-fi intro – an audial trick to open side two, prompting listeners to inspect their speaker connections and crank the volume just before the verse slams in at full pelt. We all fell for it. Dave Lombardo often singles out Ghosts Of War as a personal favourite, telling Hammer in 2022: “Whatever it is that music does to humans, stimulate your endorphins or whatever, that song uplifted me and gave me the chills when I was playing it.” CC
War Ensemble (Seasons In The Abyss, 1990)
It’s a measure of just how much thrash had infiltrated the mainstream by 1990 that Slayer were getting MTV airplay. But Seasons In The Abyss’s malevolent hellride of an opening song showed that the band also hadn’t compromised an inch of their blackened souls to get there.
War Ensemble is quintessential Slayer, a propulsive thrasher with Jeff Hanneman-penned lyrics about war that shook off any last traces of Satanic sensationalism. Naturally, Jeff faced accusations that he was glorifying conflict, something he firmly pushed back on.
“I’m not trying to force people to go into combat,” he explained. “Think about it. Because if you do, you’ll see that war-mongering is what we’re not doing. We’re just showing the ugly side… people can be such dicks sometimes.’” RH
Dead Skin Mask (Seasons In The Abyss, 1990)
Slayer have done evil, they’ve done ferocious, but they’ve never done anything as downright creepy as this study of twisted real-life serial killer Ed Gein. Jeff Hanneman said it washis favourite song on Seasons In The Abyss, describing the main riff as “just haunting”.
It certainly is, but the track also features a bone-chilling spoken-word intro from Tom Araya and a pleading child’s voice towards the end. Tom told Decibel that a friend of the band named Matt Polish came in to record the latter.
“I told him to pretend he was a little kid who didn’t wanna play anymore, who wanted to go home,” the singer recalled. “And then we pitched his voice up to make it sound like a little kid. That was supposed to be the little kid in Ed Gein: ‘I wanna go now!’ It came out really good.” PT
Skeletons Of Society (Seasons In The Abyss, 1990)
Nuclear war was a go-to topic for thrash bands throughout the 80s and early 90s, but rarely has a postapocalyptic hellscape been as poetically framed as in this Kerry King-penned rager. ‘Deafening silence reigns / As twilight fills the sky / Eventual supremacy / Daylight waits to die,’ sang Tom Araya, across a militaristic marching tempo.
As with much of the Seasons In The Abyss album, the pace was restrained, and the track could just as easily have slotted into its predecessor. “To me, Seasons… is just an extension of South Of Heaven. We were still in that frame of mind after South…,” Jeff Hanneman told Decibel, while Kerry King added that “Seasons… was what I had wanted South Of Heaven to be.”
Relatively simple and stripped down, Skeletons Of Society featured one of the band’s best chugging riffs, and proved that sometimes less really is more. PT
Seasons In The Abyss (Seasons In The Abyss, 1990)
By the end of the 80s, the grindcore scene had trounced Slayer for sheer velocity. They were too smart to bother taking on these upstarts at their own game – why would they, after all, whenthey’d made Reign In Blood? Instead, the band doubled down on the approach they’d taken with South Of Heaven. That meant continuing to play with different structures and pacings, which was nowhere more evident than on Seasons Of The Abyss’s title track.
With a grindingly atmospheric intro and a running time of over six and a half minutes, Seasons Of The Abyss is hardly a pop-metal banger but, by Slayer’s own standards, it was the most commercial song they had written to date. Tom’s vocals are delivered with a smoother than usual discernibility on the verses, while the chorus features an absolute earworm of a hook you could hum while musing on your own mortality and demise in the shower.
The track was also accompanied by a music video shot in Egypt. Having previously resisted the temptation, they finally followed Metallica (who had released their video for One the previous year) with a simple black and white clip for War Ensemble in 1990. The Seasons In The Abyss vid was far grander, featuring pyramids, tombs, horse riders and a boat on the Nile – all shot among the gathering (desert) storm of the first Gulf War.
“It added an air of excitement, didn’t it?” said producer and label head Rick Rubin. “Military exercises were taking place, diplomatic talks were being arranged, bomb shelters were being built and Slayer was shooting a video in the midst of it all.”
The idea was all Rubin’s, as Tom told Rolling Stone: “He was always trying to be the visionary. He just told us, ‘We want you to do a video where we’ll fly you to Egypt.’ And we were like, ‘Egypt?!’ I thought, ‘You know what? Fuck it. That’s so cool.’” KSP
Dittohead (Divine Intervention, 1994)
The early 90s were a tricky time for metal. Slayer’s response to grunge was to write a two-and-a-half-minute blast of sheer punk-metal fury like Dittohead, which also featured a chaotic video packed with Slayer fans who had won a competition on local radio.
By the release of Divine Intervention, Slayer had ditched their old buddy Satan and were focusing on real-life horrors and issues. Dittohead took aim at the US justice system, with the title being a derogatory term for fans of right-wing radio host and demagogue Rush Limbaugh, though it’s debatable whether it was sarcastic or not.
“It was pretty much the punkiest song I’d ever heard,” Kerry King told World magazine in 1995, “and the pissed-off lyrics were inspired by all the crazy things I’d seen on TV for the past couple of years at that time.” PT
Disciple (God Hates Us All, 2001)
The nu metal-tinged Diabolus In Musica from 1998 doesn’t get a lot of love, not least from Kerry King, who admits he took his eye off the ball for it. By the time Slayer came to record God Hates Us All, the band were itching to get back to basics.
“I felt like I had to be me again or just stop,” Kerry King told Hammer in2017. “Disciple was a big step to rediscovering that.”
God Hates Us All was a steel-plated return to form, though Disciple was more indebted to hardcore than their traditional thrash sound, with drummer Paul Bostaph – finally afforded top-tier material to work with– helping make it a tight and furious package of intensity. It also gave the album its title, with Tom Araya bellowing ‘God hates us all!’ during the song’s monster hook – a line that had an unlikely source of inspiration.
“I remember being gridlocked in LA,” Kerry told Hammer. “I looked up at this big billboard that said, ‘God loves you all.’ And I remember thinking, ‘What? He sure as hell doesn’t love me right now!’” RH
World Painted Blood (World Painted Blood, 2009)
By the time 2009 rolled around, it had been a few years since Slayer had done much to excite and instil confidence inlong-time fans. World Painted Blood was different. Especially the title track, with its incendiary hardcore punk groove, ripping riffage and bombastic vocals that rode a zip line from the incendiary mid-80s to a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 53rd Grammys.
In an interview at the time, Kerry King described how the creative process involved booking studio time with little-to-nothing written beforehand, and the four of them getting together in a room – “Just like the old days” – and hacking and slashing until an album came out at the other end. The magic was definitely still there. KSP
Repentless (Repentless, 2015)
Slayer’s 12th album was their first since the death of Jeff Hanneman, and the title track stood as tribute to the guitarist. As Kerry King told Metal Hammer: “I call it the Hannemanthem! I wrote that for Jeff. It’s fast as fuck – you don’t know what the fuck’s coming!”
He also told the Village Voice that the song summed up both Slayer and their departed bandmate. “Slayer is repentless; Slayer’s always been repentless,” he explained. “I said, ‘You know what, I should write something about how I think Jeff looked at the world, because he looked at the world exactly how Slayer looked at the world.”
As well as being a killer song, the Repentless promo kicked off the trilogy of ultra-violent music videos that would eventually be moulded into a short film titled The Repentless Killogy. “When I saw Repentless, I said: ‘That’s the video we should have done 20 years ago,’” Kerry enthused. “That video is Slayer.” PT
