September 2015 saw the release of Repentless, what we didn’t realise at the time would be Slayer’s final album. The thrash legends had been through lineup changes and the untimely passing of legendary guitarist Jeff Hanneman, yet still seemed unshakeable. In fact, what became the outlaws’ swan song was spectacularly well-received; we at Hammer wrote that “Repentless is prime fucking Slayer, arguably their finest album since… if not ever, then it’s certainly among the best.” Even without the formidable talents of Hanneman, it was a riotous success for the band and 35 years in the game didn’t seem to be taking their toll.
Just a year later, when asked about the possibility of a 13th album, guitarist Kerry King was extremely positive. The Slayer co-founder told Jagermeister in 2016: “We’ve got lots of leftover material from the last album, ’cause we wrote so much stuff, and we recorded a bunch of it too. If the lyrics don’t change the song musically, those songs are done.” That, naturally, firmly planted the seeds of hope in fans’ minds that a purported eight or so songs left over from the Repentless sessions could resurface on another Slayer album.
