Some time on a Slayer tour bus in 1985, guitarist Jeff Hanneman bought two paperback books about Josef Mengele, the SS physician who ran the medical block at Auschwitz. The lyric he started writing on the back of that reading would, within a year, get Slayer's third album refused by Columbia Records, scrubbed from Geffen's release schedule, delayed by six months and finally released on Def Jam alone, with no major label's logo on the sleeve. The song was called "Angel of Death". The album it opened was Reign in Blood.
For all the moral panic that followed, the more astonishing fact about Reign in Blood is the music it surrounds that song with: nine more tracks, ten in total, twenty-eight minutes and fifty-five seconds of thrash metal recorded at hardcore-punk velocity by a band who had not previously sounded like they could finish a chorus without a reverb tank. Rick Rubin, fresh from making rap records for Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys, walked into Hit City West in Los Angeles in early 1986, killed the room sound, pushed Dave Lombardo's kick drums to the front of the mix, and produced what is still routinely described, four decades on, as the heaviest album ever made.
Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Slayer |
| Album | Reign in Blood |
| Release Date | 7 October 1986 |
| Label | Def Jam Recordings (distributed by Geffen Records, uncredited) |
| Producers | Rick Rubin, Slayer |
| Studio | Hit City West, Los Angeles, California (January to March 1986) |
| Genre | Thrash metal |
| Track Count | 10 |
| Total Runtime | 28:55 |
| Billboard 200 Peak | 94 (debut at 127, peak in the sixth week) |
| UK Albums Chart Peak | 47 |
| Other Notable Chart Peaks | UK Rock and Metal Albums 9 (2006); Irish Albums 80 (2006); Polish Albums 48 (2022) |
| Certifications | Gold (RIAA, 20 November 1992); Silver (BPI, United Kingdom) |
| Estimated Sales | Roughly 2 million copies worldwide |
| Key Tracks | Angel of Death, Postmortem, Raining Blood |
Cultural Context: 1986 and the Year Thrash Came of Age
Reign in Blood arrived into a calendar year that anybody writing about metal still treats as a high water mark. Within twelve months of each other came Metallica's Master of Puppets in March, Megadeth's Peace Sells... but Who's Buying? in September, Kreator's Pleasure to Kill in April and Slayer's third album in October. Three of the Big Four had released what would be remembered as their definitive statements inside a single year. The genre, only four or five years old depending on where you started counting, had reached the velocity at which it became unmistakeable as anything else.
The wider American climate was tightening around it. The Parents Music Resource Center, founded by Tipper Gore and three other Washington wives the year before, had published its "Filthy Fifteen" list of objectionable songs and pushed the record industry into adopting the Parental Advisory sticker. Heavy music was a fixed target. Wal-Mart had begun refusing to stock stickered records altogether. Into that climate Slayer brought a song about Josef Mengele and a record sleeve depicting an enthroned demonic figure carried above a sea of severed heads, and asked Def Jam not to put a sticker on it. Def Jam agreed.
The other story unfolding around Reign in Blood was at the labels themselves. Def Jam, the New York hip hop imprint Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin had built around LL Cool J and Run-DMC, was at that moment distributed by Columbia Records, part of the CBS group. Rubin had decided that Def Jam needed a metal band. By the time the lawyers in Columbia's tower had finished reading the lyric sheet to "Angel of Death", Def Jam needed a new distributor too.
The Band's Story Up to This Point
Slayer formed in Huntington Park, California in 1981 around two guitarists who could not have been less alike on paper. Kerry King was a Californian shop kid with a Marshall stack and an obsessive collection of Iron Maiden records. Jeff Hanneman was a Los Angeles native already deep into hardcore punk, with a personal library of books on the Third Reich that would later be misread, often deliberately, as evidence of sympathy rather than morbid curiosity. Around them, Dave Lombardo on drums and Tom Araya on bass and vocals built a band whose first paying gig was at the Woodstock Club in Anaheim opening for an outfit called Bitch.
Brian Slagel of Metal Blade Records spotted them at that show, asked for a song for his Metal Massacre III compilation, and within a few months had signed them. Their self-financed debut Show No Mercy came out in December 1983 and shifted around 40,000 copies, paid for in part out of Araya's earnings as a respiratory therapist and money borrowed from Kerry King's father. The 1984 EP Haunting the Chapel sharpened the attack. Hell Awaits, released in April 1985, expanded the songs into longer, more progressive structures and drenched everything in reverb. It was a Metal Forces readers' poll winner for album of the year.
Lombardo had been the one to make contact with Rubin, dialling Def Jam's distributor cold to get put through. Slagel was reluctant to lose his band to a hip hop label and the rest of Slayer were initially apprehensive. Rubin flew out, photographer Glen E. Friedman vouched for him, and during a European convention Rubin met the band in person and convinced them. They were, for the first time in their lives, signed to a label with a major-distribution budget.
Pre-production and Demos
The songs that became Reign in Blood were written after Slayer came off a European tour for Hell Awaits. Hanneman and King wrote most of the music on their own and brought it to Lombardo, who learned it quickly. According to King, what they took to Brian Slagel was "just the best 10 songs we had at that point", recorded as instrumental demos. The brevity that became the album's signature was not a design decision so much as an outcome of how the pair wrote. As Hanneman put it in a Decibel oral history:
"If we do a verse two or three times, we're already bored with it. So we weren't trying to make the songs shorter, that's just what we were into."
Jeff Hanneman, Decibel Magazine, 2006
The lyric for "Angel of Death" was already drafted by the time the band reached the studio. Hanneman wrote it after stopping during the Hell Awaits tour to buy paperbacks about Mengele. "I thought, 'This has gotta be some sick shit,'" he later told Decibel. "So when it came time to do the record, that stuff was still in my head, that's where the lyrics to 'Angel of Death' came from." Other songs were drawn from a deliberate move away from Hell Awaits's hell-and-Satan focus into what Araya called subjects "more on a social level": criminal insanity, serial killers, disease, the casual evils of medicine and church. Working titles and demo recordings have been alluded to in interviews but never widely circulated; the Decibel oral history records that Lombardo learned the material so quickly the band considered the demos almost finished arrangements.
Creating the Album
Sessions began at Hit City West in Los Angeles in January 1986 and wrapped by March. Rubin produced. Andy Wallace, who would mix Nirvana's Nevermind five years later, engineered. Howie Weinberg mastered. Slayer received a co-production credit, but the studio direction was Rubin's, and his single biggest decision was to take the band's previous sound apart.
Hell Awaits had been awash in reverb, the band's homage to Venom and Mercyful Fate. Rubin played it back to King and asked, in effect, what they imagined that wash of room sound was achieving. The answer was that, played at thrash tempos, the reverb tails on consecutive notes piled into each other and turned the riffs to slurry. Rubin's instruction to the engineering team was to record the band dry and bright. King later recalled the moment they heard the playback:
"It was like, 'Wow, you can hear everything, and those guys aren't just playing fast; those notes are on time.'"
Kerry King, Decibel Magazine, 2006
Rubin's own explanation, given to Metal Injection in 2024 and consistent with everything he had said about the album since 1986, was about giving each element room to breathe rather than adding mass:
"When I hear very fast music like Metallica, and the sounds are big sounds, the whole thing gets blurry. If the music you're playing is fast and if the sounds are big, there's not enough space for those big sounds to happen next to each other. There's no punctuation; it becomes a blur. I didn't want it to be a blur of bass; I wanted it to be a pulse."
Rick Rubin, Metal Injection, 2024
That pulse came from Dave Lombardo, who in 1986 was already known as a fast drummer and on Reign in Blood became something more like the definitional one. Lombardo used two separate bass drums rather than a double pedal, on the principle that hitting a freshly resonating head with a single pedal produced a quieter, less defined second beat than two heads played alternately. On "Angel of Death" he tracked a sixteenth-note double-bass pattern at around 210 beats per minute, a figure cited by Decibel and AllMusic. Araya's opening scream on the same song, the one that has gone on to be played somewhere in metal nearly every night for forty years, was tracked in either one take or two depending on whose account you believe; Araya himself has told it both ways.
King and Hanneman's guitar parts were layered for density without obscuring each other. The two play almost identical solo styles, what Invisible Oranges has called "virtually identical" right down to the whammy-bar dive-bomb finish, and the rhythm bed was set up so the doubled riffs sat slightly differently in the stereo field. When Slayer recruited Paul Bostaph in 1992, his one mistake during the audition was on "Angel of Death": he could not work out how many revolutions the guitar riff went through before the double-bass pattern arrived. The answer was eight, and even with Lombardo's records to study, the song had been arranged for ears that already knew what was coming next.
The band did not realise how short the album was going to be until mixing. Worried they might need to record more, they asked Rubin. Araya told Metal Hammer that Rubin's answer "was that it had 10 songs, verses, choruses and leads and that's what constituted an album. He didn't have any issue with it." When the final master arrived, Rubin asked the band whether they realised how brief it was. King's response, according to the Decibel oral history, was a collective shrug: "So what?" The album fitted onto one side of a 30-minute cassette, which King thought was a virtue: "You could listen to it, flip it over, and play it again."
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core band | ||
| Lead vocals, bass | Tom Araya | Opening scream on "Angel of Death" tracked in one or two takes; accounts differ. |
| Guitars | Jeff Hanneman | Wrote the music and lyrics for "Angel of Death" and "Postmortem", plus the music for "Raining Blood". |
| Guitars | Kerry King | Co-writer of every other track on the album. |
| Drums | Dave Lombardo | Used two kick drums rather than a double pedal. Departed the band in late 1986 after one month of the W.A.S.P. opening slot; returned in 1987. |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producer | Rick Rubin | First metal production after Run-DMC, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys. |
| Co-producer | Slayer | Credited collectively. |
| Engineer | Andy Wallace | Went on to mix Nirvana's Nevermind in 1991. |
| Mastering | Howie Weinberg | Long-time Sterling Sound mastering engineer. |
| Artwork | ||
| Cover illustration | Larry W. Carroll | Hired at Rubin's behest. At the time Carroll was illustrating for The Progressive, The Village Voice and The New York Times. Returned for South of Heaven (1988), Seasons in the Abyss (1990) and Christ Illusion (2006). |
One footnote on the credits is worth flagging because it has been mythologised for decades. The eagle logo that began appearing on Slayer merchandise from Seasons in the Abyss onward came, according to Araya, from a book Hanneman owned on Nazi war medals; Rubin himself suggested using it. The logo postdates Reign in Blood by four years but the cluster of imagery, Mengele, Knight's Crosses, eagles, and Hanneman's prized German Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, was already in place around the band in 1986 and contributed to the suspicion that has dogged them ever since.
The Songs
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Angel of Death | Hanneman | 4:51 | Lyrics about Josef Mengele. The album's longest track and the song that triggered Columbia's refusal to distribute. | |
| 2 | Piece by Piece | King | 2:02 | Dismemberment narrative; one of the shortest cuts. | |
| 3 | Necrophobic | Hanneman, King | 1:40 | The shortest song Slayer had ever recorded. | |
| 4 | Altar of Sacrifice | Hanneman (music); King (lyrics) | 2:50 | Cited by Dave Brockie of Gwar as his favourite Slayer song. | |
| 5 | Jesus Saves | Hanneman, King (music); King (lyrics) | 2:54 | Religious satire that came in for predictable criticism on release. | |
| 6 | Criminally Insane | Hanneman, King | 2:23 | 1987 remix promo | A remix version appeared as the second promotional release from the album. |
| 7 | Reborn | Hanneman (music); King (lyrics) | 2:11 | Live setlist mainstay through the 1986 to 1987 tour. | |
| 8 | Epidemic | Hanneman, King (music); King (lyrics) | 2:23 | Bubonic plague subject matter; segues into "Postmortem". | |
| 9 | Postmortem | Hanneman | 3:27 | 1986 promo | The album's first promotional release; segues directly into "Raining Blood". |
| 10 | Raining Blood | Hanneman (music); Hanneman, King (lyrics) | 4:14 | Closing track. The most frequently performed song from the album. |
"Angel of Death" opens with what is, by reasonable consensus, the most recognisable scream in heavy metal: a single sustained note from Tom Araya followed by the cymbal-and-power-chord pattern Adrien Begrand of Decibel said "epitomised the genre in 30 seconds." It is also the longest and most structurally conventional song on the record, with proper verses, choruses and a half-time middle riff that Public Enemy later sampled, uncredited, for "She Watch Channel Zero?!" on It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Its lyric is written partly from Mengele's point of view and partly from that of a detached observer, a choice that Hanneman insisted was not endorsement but documentary. He pursued the point in a 1987 NME interview:
"I feel you should be able to write about whatever you want. 'Angel of Death' is like a history lesson. I'd read a lot about the Third Reich and was absolutely fascinated by the extremity of it all."
Jeff Hanneman, NME, 1987
What follows on side one is some of the most concentrated short-form thrash ever pressed to vinyl. "Piece by Piece", "Necrophobic", "Altar of Sacrifice" and "Jesus Saves" arrive in a single block of nine and a half minutes, none of them long enough to settle into anything resembling a groove, all of them structurally lean to the point that the band weren't sure they qualified as songs at all. "Necrophobic" at one minute forty is essentially three riffs and a solo. Side two opens with "Criminally Insane" and "Reborn", drops into the disease pair of "Epidemic" and "Postmortem", and then arrives at "Raining Blood".
"Raining Blood" closes the album with the now-iconic Lombardo rolling-thunder figure, Hanneman's descending tritone riff and an outro of rainfall samples that has become one of the most often-cited endings in metal. It is the song Slayer played at almost every show for the rest of their career, the song the band ended their 2004 Still Reigning tour by performing while drenched in stage blood, and the song most listeners would name if asked to think of any Slayer song at all.
B-sides, Outtakes and Lost Songs
Reign in Blood was not a singles-era release in any conventional sense and produced no commercial singles in the radio-edit-and-B-side format. Two tracks were issued as promotional items: "Postmortem" was sent out by Def Jam in 1986 ahead of the album, and a remixed version of "Criminally Insane" followed as a promo in 1987. Both have appeared on subsequent expanded editions of the album, along with "Aggressive Perfector", a song Slayer had originally written for the Metal Massacre III compilation in 1983 and re-recorded during the Reign in Blood sessions. The expanded reissue pushes the total runtime out to 34:43; the original Def Jam album is the version most listeners still mean when they refer to the record.
No widely circulating bootleg of unreleased Reign in Blood material has ever appeared. The Decibel oral history makes clear that the album was, by the standards of the era, recorded almost entirely to a brief: Hanneman and King wrote the songs at home, the band rehearsed them, and they were tracked. There were no abandoned ballads, no producer-shelved experiments, no half-written tenth track that nearly made the cut.
Album Artwork and Packaging
Larry W. Carroll's cover was Rubin's hire. Carroll was a freelance illustrator best known at the time for political work in The Progressive, The Village Voice and The New York Times. His pen-and-ink composition shows an enthroned demonic figure carried by four bearers above a sea of severed heads floating in red. Slayer's logo sits top left, the album title bottom right. The first the band knew of the finished image was when they were handed it; King has been blunt about his initial reaction in interviews since:
"Nobody in the band wanted that cover. We were stuck with it."
Kerry King, Decibel Magazine, 2006
Araya, characteristically, gave a different version: he said he thought the image was amazing and liked it immediately, and remembered three variations of the cover circulating during conceptual stages, of which the final version blended elements. Carroll went on to illustrate the sleeves for South of Heaven (1988), Seasons in the Abyss (1990) and Christ Illusion (2006), which suggests the band's disagreement with him cooled quickly. In 2006 Blender magazine listed the Reign in Blood sleeve in its top ten heavy metal album covers of all time.
Packaging variations across territories were minimal in 1986. Cassette pressings put the entire album on one side. A picture-disc vinyl was issued for the first time on later anniversary editions. The 2014 super-deluxe vinyl reissue is the version most frequently cited by collectors for sleeve quality, with a half-speed remaster following on subsequent pressings.
Release and Reception
The album finally appeared on 7 October 1986, roughly six months later than the band's original target of April. There were no radio singles, no MTV rotation and no advertising in the trade press to speak of, because Geffen had insisted that its name not appear on the record and Def Jam had no metal infrastructure of its own. Even so, Reign in Blood debuted on the Billboard 200 at number 127, climbed to a peak of 94 in its sixth week and held a chart presence well into 1987. In the United Kingdom it reached 47. Both were the first chart placings of Slayer's career.
Critical response was sharply split along generational and stylistic lines. Robert Christgau, reviewing in The Village Voice in March 1987, gave it a tepid B-plus. The metal press loved it. Kerrang!'s Xavier Russell called it the heaviest album of all time in his October 1986 review, a phrase the magazine has repeated for nearly forty years. Steve Huey, writing for AllMusic, settled on a verdict that has become canonical:
"A stone-cold classic."
Steve Huey, AllMusic
Decibel inducted the album into its Hall of Fame in November 2004, making it the first record ever to receive the honour. Rolling Stone placed it sixth on its 2017 list of the 100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time. NME listed it at 287 on its 2013 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Loudwire ranked it first on its 2016 ranking of Slayer's eleven studio albums. Rock Hard's 2005 German-language 500 Greatest Rock and Metal Albums book placed it sixth. Spin's 100 Greatest Albums 1985 to 2005 list put it at 67. RIAA Gold certification arrived on 20 November 1992. The BPI later certified it Silver in the United Kingdom.
The single most-quoted retrospective verdict on the album's place in metal history is Kerry King's own:
"If you released Reign in Blood today, no one would give a shit. It was timing; it was a change in sound. In thrash metal at that time, no one had ever heard good production on a record like that. It was just a bunch of things that came together at once."
Kerry King, Kerrang! interview, c. 2001
Singles and Music Videos
Slayer made no music video for any track on Reign in Blood. There were no commercial singles. The two promotional releases, "Postmortem" in 1986 and a remix of "Criminally Insane" in 1987, were directed at metal radio specialty shows and tape traders rather than mainstream radio. There were no charted singles from the album in any territory. The absence of single-format promotion was partly Def Jam's lack of metal infrastructure and partly Geffen's refusal to be visibly attached, but it was also Rubin's strategy: he had concluded that a thrash record's promotional engine in 1986 was touring and word of mouth, not radio.
That decision matters because it is one of the reasons Reign in Blood eventually felt like an underground record despite reaching the top 100 of the Billboard 200. There were no edits, no shortened versions, no music-television footage to soften the album for general audiences. A fan in 1987 had either heard the whole record or none of it.
Touring and Live
Slayer began touring behind the album in late 1986 under the banner Reign in Pain. Overkill opened the United States dates and Malice opened the European leg. The band joined W.A.S.P.'s 1987 American tour as opening act. Tour incidents accumulated quickly. One month into the W.A.S.P. dates, Dave Lombardo quit. He had just married, the band's per-show wages were not covering his bills, and he had decided that being on a major label ought to mean making a living. His own summary was characteristically direct:
"I wasn't making any money. I figured if we were gonna be doing this professionally, on a major label, I wanted my rent and utilities paid."
Dave Lombardo, Decibel Magazine, 2006
Tony Scaglione of Whiplash was brought in to finish the tour. Rubin lobbied Lombardo daily by phone, offered him a salary, drove to his house in a Porsche to collect him, and eventually persuaded him to return in 1987. Slayer played the record live without a single conventional production element: no banners, no risers, no theatrical lighting beyond what venues could supply. Several dates in 1986 and 1987 were cancelled by local promoters citing audience disturbances or content concerns; the European leg in particular ran into resistance from venue managers nervous about Hanneman's lyric for the opening song.
The most memorable later live document of Reign in Blood is the 2004 Still Reigning tour, on which the band played the album from start to finish and ended the show with "Raining Blood" while drenched in fake stage blood. A live DVD of the same name, recorded at the Augusta Civic Center in Augusta, Maine on 11 July 2004, captured the staging at its peak. The album was performed in full again at the third European leg of the Unholy Alliance Tour in Paris in November 2008, at the I'll Be Your Mirror London festival at Alexandra Palace in May 2012 for its 25th anniversary, and across multiple stops on Riot Fest's 2014 Classic Albums series in Chicago and Denver. As of late 2025, Slayer have confirmed a 40th-anniversary run of shows for 2026, including the inaugural Sick New World Texas festival in Fort Worth and headlining slots at Rocklahoma and at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles.
In TV, Film and Media
- "Angel of Death" was used in the opening sequence of Jackass: The Movie (2002), in which Johnny Knoxville rents a car and enters it into a demolition derby.
- The mid-song "Angel of Death" half-time riff was sampled, uncredited, on Public Enemy's "She Watch Channel Zero?!" from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988).
- The same riff was sampled by industrial act KMFDM on "Godlike" (1990).
- M.O.P. sampled it again on "Raise Hell".
- "Raining Blood" has been used in dozens of film and television placements over the years, including a notably out-of-context appearance during a piano-cover sequence on South Park.
Controversy, Censorship and Lawsuits
Columbia Records, Def Jam's distributor in 1986, refused to release Reign in Blood after reading the lyric sheet for "Angel of Death". Araya has insisted in interviews since that the objection was to the song specifically and not, as has often been claimed, to Larry Carroll's cover art. Geffen Records agreed to step in and distribute, but on condition that the album did not appear on Geffen's official release schedule and that the Geffen logo did not appear on the sleeve. This is why both Def Jam and Geffen are listed on the album's credits even though one of them did not formally exist on the package.
The song's content has dogged the band for forty years. Hanneman's interest in Mengele was part of a wider fascination with the Third Reich, supported by a personal collection of Nazi memorabilia that included, by his own account, a Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. The repeated accusation that Slayer were Nazi sympathisers ran through European tours in particular. Hanneman addressed the misreading directly:
"I know why people misinterpret it, it's because they get this knee-jerk reaction to it. When they read the lyrics, there's nothing I put in the lyrics that says necessarily he was a bad man, because to me, well, isn't that obvious? I shouldn't have to tell you that."
Jeff Hanneman, KNAC interview, 2004
Def Jam declined to put a Parental Advisory sticker on the album when the format was introduced. The band have never faced a legal action specifically tied to Reign in Blood, though the better-known 1995 lawsuit brought against Slayer by the parents of Elyse Pahler, who was murdered by three fans in 1995, drew widely on the Reign in Blood catalogue. The case was dismissed in 2001 on principles of free speech and lack of foreseeability.
Covers, Samples and Tributes
Direct covers of Reign in Blood material tend to come from within the death metal and grindcore worlds rather than the mainstream metal canon. Cannibal Corpse, Tool and a long tail of European death metal bands have all played live covers of "Raining Blood" and "Angel of Death" at various points; tribute albums dedicated to Slayer specifically, including the Slatanic Slaughter compilations of the late 1990s, draw heavily on Reign in Blood. The album's most surprising downstream presence is in hip hop: as noted above, Public Enemy and M.O.P. both sampled the "Angel of Death" riff, and Necro has frequently cited the album as a formative influence on his rap production.
Bands who explicitly credit Reign in Blood as a foundational influence include Pantera, Sepultura, Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel, Death, Obituary, Napalm Death, Lamb of God, Trivium, Behemoth and Avenged Sevenfold. Andreas Kisser of Sepultura's flat statement that "without Slayer, Sepultura would never be possible" is widely echoed in the genre. Paul Mazurkiewicz of Cannibal Corpse has said that Lombardo's drumming on the record alone helped him learn to play faster throughout his career. Paul Bostaph, who would later replace Lombardo in Slayer twice, first heard the album at a party as a member of Forbidden, walked toward the music in another room and asked Forbidden guitarist Craig Locicero what was playing. Locicero shouted, "The new Slayer record." Bostaph's verdict on his own band, as reported in the Decibel oral history, was that they were "fucked".
Reissues, Remasters and Anniversaries
Reign in Blood has been reissued repeatedly, beginning with a 1987 CD pressing that added "Aggressive Perfector" and the "Criminally Insane" remix. A 2007 expanded edition added further bonus material and a DVD. Half-speed remastered vinyl pressings have appeared at successive anniversaries. A picture-disc edition was issued for the 30th anniversary in 2016. As of 2025, no full Dolby Atmos or spatial-audio mix has been confirmed by the label.
Live full-album performances now form their own discography of sorts. The 2004 Still Reigning DVD remains the canonical live document. The 2008 Le Zénith performance in Paris was professionally recorded but never officially released as a standalone live album. The 2011 Alexandra Palace performance marked the album's 25th anniversary and the I'll Be Your Mirror London festival; the 2014 Riot Fest performances added further dates. For the 40th anniversary in 2026, Slayer have confirmed dates around the album at Sick New World Texas, Rocklahoma and the Kia Forum.
Well-circulated bootlegs include rehearsal-room recordings from the 1986 Reign in Pain tour and a fragmentary multitrack leak from the Hit City West sessions that has surfaced periodically on tape-trading forums. Neither has ever been authenticated by the band.
Legacy and Influence
Reign in Blood is the most-canonised single thrash album of the 1980s and, by most measures, of any decade. It set the template for everything death metal would do later, which is why Florida death metal scene founder Kam Lee has said flatly that "there wouldn't be death metal or black metal or even extreme metal (the likes of what it is today) if not for Slayer." It became the bridge between heavy metal and hardcore punk that everyone had assumed could not be built. It made Rick Rubin's reputation as a metal producer overnight, set up his subsequent work with Danzig, the Cult and eventually Metallica, and led directly to Slayer's South of Heaven (1988) and Seasons in the Abyss (1990), the two records that, with Reign in Blood, form the band's untouchable run.
For Slayer specifically, Reign in Blood is also the album that has shadowed every subsequent record. When Hanneman explained in interviews why South of Heaven slowed down, he said the band had decided not to try to outpace Reign in Blood and to give themselves room to grow. Asked thirty years later why Reign in Blood had retained the gravitational pull it has, King's reply, given to Kerrang!, came back to the same insight as his quote above: timing and production, not any one element of the songs themselves. Rolling Stone, on the album's 30th anniversary in 2016, called it the moment American metal stopped trying to look like rock and roll and started looking like itself.
Kurt Cobain owned a copy. Pantera's Dimebag Darrell cited it in nearly every interview he gave. James Hetfield of Metallica has said that the album was the thing his band were measuring themselves against in 1986. Hanneman, asked which Slayer record he loved most, never wavered:
"It's so short and quick and to the point."
Jeff Hanneman, KNAC interview, 2006
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The Geffen sleeve omission | Geffen Records distributed Reign in Blood after Columbia refused, but on the condition that the Geffen logo was kept off the sleeve and the album was left off Geffen's release schedule. |
| Two books on Mengele | Jeff Hanneman wrote "Angel of Death" after buying a pair of paperbacks on Josef Mengele at a stop during the Hell Awaits tour; he later said he had thought, "this has gotta be some sick shit." |
| One side of a cassette | At 28 minutes 55 seconds, Reign in Blood fitted entirely onto side A of a 30-minute cassette. Kerry King considered this a virtue rather than a deficiency: flip it over and play it again. |
| Rubin's first metal record | Reign in Blood was Rick Rubin's first heavy metal production. He had previously produced Run-DMC, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill. |
| Two kick drums, not a double pedal | Dave Lombardo tracked the album on two separate bass drums rather than a double pedal, on the theory that hitting a freshly resonating head with a single pedal produces a quieter second beat than two heads alternating. |
| Tracked at 210 BPM | The Decibel and AllMusic measure of the "Angel of Death" double-bass section is around 210 beats per minute, which in 1986 was widely thought to be at the edge of what a rock drummer could physically sustain. |
| The first Decibel Hall of Fame | When Decibel Magazine launched its Hall of Fame in November 2004, Reign in Blood was the first album inducted, ahead of every other record in metal history. |
| Rubin's Porsche ride | When Dave Lombardo quit Slayer in late 1986, Rubin telephoned him daily for months, offered him a salary, and eventually drove to his house in a Porsche to bring him back to a Slayer rehearsal. |
| Andy Wallace and Nirvana | Engineer Andy Wallace went on to mix Nirvana's Nevermind in 1991. The same hands that captured the dry, punchy attack of Reign in Blood helped shape the album that broke alternative rock to a mainstream audience. |
| Sampled by Public Enemy | The mid-song half-time riff from "Angel of Death" was sampled, without credit, on Public Enemy's "She Watch Channel Zero?!" from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988). |
| The Bostaph audition | When Paul Bostaph auditioned for Slayer in 1992, his one mistake out of nine songs was the riff count on "Angel of Death", which he had been learning from live recordings rather than the studio track. |
| The only recorded use of "abacinate" | "Angel of Death" contains what Foyle's Philavery: A Treasury of Unusual Words identifies as the only known recorded popular-song use of the word "abacinate", meaning to blind by means of a heated metal plate held close to the eyes. |
| Carroll the political illustrator | Larry W. Carroll was, at the time of the Reign in Blood commission, illustrating mainly for The Progressive, The Village Voice and The New York Times, not the metal press. |
| The eagle came later | Slayer's eagle logo, often misread as a Reign in Blood image, was first used on Seasons in the Abyss in 1990. Araya credits Rubin with proposing it from a book on Nazi war medals that Hanneman owned. |
A Closing Note for the Podcast
If this is the kind of close reading of a single album that interests you, the Riffology podcast does exactly this in audio form: two hosts, one record at a time, the full story from pre-production to legacy. The podcast is available wherever you get your shows. Slayer's Reign in Blood is the kind of album the show was built for: short, loud, divisive, and forty years into its life still the record that defines its genre.
Comments