Slayer’s Kerry King Details ‘Spooky, Heavy’ New Album ‘Repentless’
UPDATE: Slayer have revealed the name and release date of their upcoming album in a new teaser video. Repentless will be the 11th studio album by the iconic metal band and will be released on September 11th.
Slayer guitarist Kerry King was in an unusually bad mood when he wrote the band’s crushing new single, “When the Stillness Comes.” “We were touring Europe and we had a three-hour ride in some fucking minivan, and I’m just miserable in the backseat, not into anything,” he says of the song, which is streaming below. “So I just stated jotting down hateful thoughts. It’s about a dude who wakes up at a crime scene and realizes he’s killed everybody. It’s really cool.”
The track, which begins with an eerie guitar line before evolving into a full-on doomy (and classic Slayer) riff onslaught, will be coming out this weekend on a picture-disc seven-inch for Record Store Day. It’s one of 12 new songs that will appear on the thrash-metal titans’ upcoming new record, their first since 2009’s World Painted Blood. The LP, produced by Terry Date (Pantera, White Zombie), will also be the band’s first album since the death of founding guitarist Jeff Hanneman in 2013 and the departure of drummer Dave Lombardo that same year. It’s tentatively due out this August, and King – who is dressed in black and seated at the table of Rolling Stone’s conference room, his long brown beard creeping below its surface – says he’s not nervous about releasing it.
“I know there’s gonna be naysayers,” he says coolly, occasionally sipping from a red Solo cup he brought with him. “I know there’s gonna be people expecting us to fail, because so many things changed in the last six years. I’m prepared for that ’cause I know humans are just retards when they get on the Internet. But I know we put a good product together. I’m proud of it.”
The way King sees it, there are two types of Slayer songs: heavy and thrash. “The spooky ones fall into heavy, but there’s not a lot of gray area,” he says. The upcoming record – which has a title, but the guitarist is keeping that secret for now – is evenly split between those styles but leans a little more toward the heavy side of things, “but there’s still plenty of speed,” he adds.
Fans will already know a couple of the record’s tracks. Slayer released the driving thrasher “Implode” as a surprise free download last year, and the galloping “Atrocity Vendor” previously came out as the B Side to the “World Painted Blood” seven-inch – but both will sound different. “Implode” was originally intended for an unreleased 2012 EP, and when they finally issues the song, returning drummer Paul Bostaph – who previously played with the group throughout most of the Nineties and on 2001’s God Hates Us All – recorded long to an existing track, so they recut it from scratch for the new album. Slayer rewrote parts of “Atrocity Vendor,” giving it updated lyrics and a longer solo.