The End of Slayer, The Greatest Metal Band Still Going

My personal favorite of thrash metal’s Big Four, Slayer, announced last month that they’ll be calling it quits after 37 years. That’s older than most of my friends, and more than three times as long as my parents were married. I probably hang out with too many young people, and my parents hated each other, but still: It’s an accomplishment. And even though they’re calling it a day, there’s no way I’ll ever be able to talk about them in the past tense.

Slayer is one of those bands that people who know nothing about metal know about. Even if they’ve never heard them, they have a general idea of what they sound like, because Slayer have always been so good at projecting a particularly evil vibe. That said, whatever the poor soul imagines is definitely nowhere near as precise or beautiful or harrowing or pummeling or catchy as Slayer actually is.

In a note posted to social media about the breakup, the band described its sound as “thrash/metal/punk”; you could add many more genre tags to that list. What Slayer does is technically thrash, but by mixing in punk, hardcore, death metal, and more, the songs become more than the mere sum of their parts. The start of “Raining Blood” is some of my favorite dark ambient music ever (just loop it a few times). Would there be black metal without Slayer? Maybe not. There is something pop to them, too: Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King, perhaps the greatest guitar duo ever, craft darting hooks and gorgeous melodies out of frantic minor chords. And like good punks, they don’t fuck around: Reign in Blood, the 1986 masterpiece that marked the start of Slayer’s crucial relationship with producer Rick Rubin and laid the groundwork for so many thrash (and otherwise extreme) bands to follow, is less than 30 minutes long. (This makes it easy to fit in my near-daily listening.) On the downside, Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo gives the album credit for inspiring him to “rock out.”

Slayer has been a big influence on my own life, ever since I was about 13. I grew up in small town in the Pine Barrens of South Jersey (population: 800), where you didn’t hear too much about anything underground. But we all—meaning me and my two friends—loved Slayer. They could make very complicated and challenging music work on a larger scale, which I realized when my terrible high school band tried to cover them. Even when you’re a teenager in the middle of nowhere with no real sense of how things work, no real clue, and the wrong-headed idea that you’re invincible, it was clear that Slayer’s music was too complex to replicate. At that age you still kind of believe their satanism is real, and that aura of transgression felt good when you hated the people in your high school who felt like they belonged. A lot of people older than me bought into the Satan thing, too; Slayer were sued for possibly inspiring three boys to kill a teenage girl in 1995 as part of a satanic ritual (the case was ultimately thrown out). In light of the country’s current political situation, the world’s environmental collapse, and the existence of a black-metal dramedy (Lords of Chaos), satanism seems pretty quaint in 2018, but there was a time when this stuff felt genuinely scary.

Often, as you get older, you grow out of the music you liked as a kid. Or you listen out of nostalgia, when something’s gone terribly wrong in your life. But none of that applied to Slayer. They feel as present to me now as they did decades ago. As a fully formed adult, in 2007, I named my Pitchfork metal column Show No Mercy after Slayer’s first album, from 1983. (It’s easy to forget Slayer were an ’80s band once, and a ’90s band, and a band in the new millennium, too.) When I left Pitchfork for a bit and relocated the column to another site, I called it Haunting the Chapel, after Slayer’s next release, an EP from 1984. I stopped crisscrossing after that, but I’m sure I would’ve named a column after some other Slayer album if I’d kept moving. In fact, only now do I realize my wife and I should’ve named our dog “Angel of Death” instead of Pete.

It’s not easy to be in an extreme band of any sort and to easily cross into other realms without seeming out of place or by doing embarrassing things. The artist Matthew Barney loves Slayer, though, so he included drummer Dave Lombardo in an experimental film he made in 1999, Cremaster 2. Lombardo’s drumming in a studio alongside a swarm of bees while Morbid Angel’s Steve Tucker sings into a phone about Johnny Cash. That’s the thing: Slayer is the rare metal band that can show up in an avant-garde film series named for the muscle that connects the scrotum to a man’s body and not seem extra or out of place. They managed to stay a bit outside of popular culture while still becoming part of it.

Over the past few years, on paper at least, Slayer wasn’t exactly Slayer. Jeff Hanneman, responsible for so many of Slayer’s best songs and most memorable riffs (“Raining Blood,” “South of Heaven,” “Angel of Death,” “Die by the Sword,” “War Ensemble”), died in 2013. The band’s original drummer, the aforementioned Dave Lombardo, left the band in 2013, after coming and going previously. One friend recently said to me, “They probably hung on a little too long. Natural ending should have been Hanneman’s death by flesh-eating spider.” He actually died of cirrhosis of the liver, though a spider bite in a friend’s hot tub had caused necrotizing fasciitis a couple years earlier. That the fantasy of the spider manages to eclipse reality is part of what made the band so timeless and impressively specific.

And, to be fair, their late-period records—from 2006 to 2015—have either been solid or more than solid. (Exodus’ Gary Holt replaced Hanneman in 2013, so at least they hired within the original Big Four.) It’s hard to compete with the classic records, because they came to me when I was a kid, and have stuck with me in only the way things can when you find them at that time in your life, but their last few offerings weren’t embarrassing. Unlike their peers in Metallica and Megadeth, Slayer never shamed themselves with demystifying documentaries or extended string accompaniments. One of their last albums, 2009’s World Painted Blood, is a “return to form” that hearkens back to 1990’s Seasons in the Abyss while still sounding fresh, and I see it aging especially well. In general, they have just solidly kept doing their thing. They didn’t ever cater to trends or desperately try to expand their sound: Slayer created their own world, populated it for 37 years with their own distinctly refined, acrobatic, and evil thrash, and then decided to blow it apart on their own terms.

Bands announce breakups all the time these days— it’s part of a basic press cycle—and if we’ve learned anything, nothing lasts forever, not even that breakup. You can’t trust it usually—a year or two later, they’re touring again, and hitting every cookie-cutter festival. But I trust Slayer not to turn this into some LCD Soundsystem bullshit; it wouldn’t fit with anything else they’ve done up to this point. Outside of the phony satanism, they’re one of the most honest bands I know.