Sixteen years after the last Slayer record to feature its original four members, Dave Lombardo walked back into a Los Angeles studio with Kerry King, Jeff Hanneman and Tom Araya, and the band that had spent the previous decade redrawing its own outline around two replacement drummers tore that outline up. Christ Illusion is the album where the four players who built Reign in Blood and Seasons in the Abyss finally regrouped on tape, and it is also the album that the world's largest record company quietly destroyed in India two months after release.
That double headline, homecoming and bonfire, is what makes the tenth Slayer studio album the strangest entry in their catalogue. It is the record where Lombardo's name went back on the spine, where the band scored its first ever Grammy, and where Larry Carroll's painting of an eyeless Christ standing in a sea of severed heads got the disc pulled off Indian shelves and pulped. The story of how those things ended up bolted to the same release runs from a scrapped 6/6/06 marketing gag to a Catholic Secular Forum memorandum delivered to Mumbai's police commissioner, and it goes through one of the more underrated production choices in Slayer's history along the way.
Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Slayer |
| Album | Christ Illusion |
| Release date | 8 August 2006 |
| Label | American Recordings / Warner Bros. Records |
| Producer | Josh Abraham (production, mixing); Rick Rubin (executive producer) |
| Studios | NRG Recording, North Hollywood; Westlake Recording, Los Angeles (tracking); Pulse Recording, Los Angeles (mixing); Sony Music Studios, New York City (mastering) |
| Genre | Thrash metal |
| Track count | 10 (11 with bonus "Final Six" on 2007 digipak) |
| Total runtime | 38:25 (42:35 with bonus track) |
| Billboard 200 peak | 5 |
| UK Albums Chart peak | 23 (number 1 on UK Rock & Metal Albums Chart) |
| Other notable chart peaks | Germany 2, Finland 2, Canada 3, Sweden 4, Austria 6, Netherlands 8, Australia 9, Poland 9, Norway 10, New Zealand 10, Ireland 10, Japan 17 |
| Awards | Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance, "Eyes of the Insane" (2007); Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance, "Final Six" (2008); Metal Storm Award for Best Thrash Metal Album (2006) |
| First-week US sales | 62,000 |
| Key singles | "Cult", "Eyes of the Insane" |
Cultural Context
The summer of 2006 was a busy one for heavy music. Tool's 10,000 Days had already moved hundreds of thousands of copies in its first week back in May. Iron Maiden were finishing A Matter of Life and Death, Mastodon were putting the last touches to Blood Mountain, and Red Hot Chili Peppers had owned the spring with Stadium Arcadium. Metallica were eighteen months into their slow, Rick Rubin-assisted gestation of Death Magnetic. The bigger cultural backdrop was uglier: the second Lebanon War broke out in July, the United States was three and a half years into the Iraq occupation, Saddam Hussein was on trial in Baghdad, and the Twitter prototype had just been launched out of an Odeo side project the previous March.
None of that is window dressing for Slayer in 2006. The two songs on Christ Illusion that drew the most press, "Jihad" and "Eyes of the Insane", are direct responses to that world. The first is written from the perspective of a 9/11 hijacker. The second was inspired by a Texas Monthly feature on US soldiers returning from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder. The band that had spent the 1980s writing about Mengele and Heydrich now had a war on terror to work with, and they used it.
The Band's Story Up to This Point
Slayer had finished the previous decade in a state of slow administrative reshuffle. Lombardo had left in 1992 to be present for the birth of his first child, formed Grip Inc., recorded with Fantomas and John Zorn, and moved well away from thrash. Paul Bostaph took over for Divine Intervention (1994), the punk-covers detour Undisputed Attitude (1996), the nu-metal-adjacent Diabolus in Musica (1998) and finally God Hates Us All, released, with grim timing, on 11 September 2001. Bostaph quit before Christmas that year due to a chronic elbow injury, and Slayer's manager Rick Sales rang Lombardo and asked if he wanted to finish the unfinished European leg of the Tattoo the Planet tour.
He did. Lombardo's first show back was at Toad's Place in New Haven on 24 January 2002, and although he had only signed on as a touring drummer, he never left again. He spent the next four years on the road with the band, playing two full Reign in Blood tours, the Still Reigning DVD shoot, Ozzfest 2004, the Download Festival, and the H82K2 run, without recording any new material. Through 2003 and 2004, King and Hanneman quietly began writing the album that would become Christ Illusion. Lombardo demoed nine of the eventual eleven songs at home with King across 2003 and 2004, but Slayer's label was in the middle of moving its distribution from Columbia to Warner Bros., and the recording was iced until that deal closed in late July 2005.
Pre-production and Demos
The Christ Illusion demos sat on the shelf longer than the actual album took to make. By the time King and Hanneman had a finished batch of songs together, the band was openly chasing Rick Rubin to produce. Rubin had made Reign in Blood the record it is and had executive-produced everything Slayer had released since, but in 2005 he was deep in pre-production with Metallica on the album that would eventually arrive as Death Magnetic three years later. The Slayer schedule slipped. King would later describe Rubin's choice to give his hands to Metallica instead as a "slap in the fucking face."
"It kind of has an 'Angel of Death' feel because it doesn't condemn anyone or say that anyone's right or wrong."
Kerry King on "Jihad", Contactmusic / Blabbermouth, 2006
Once Josh Abraham was hired in his place, the songs went into the studio fast. King has been clear in multiple 2006 interviews that he wrote roughly 80 per cent of his guitar solo parts before the band even started tracking. "Catalyst" had been kicking around since the God Hates Us All sessions, when an alternative version had been recorded with Paul Bostaph on drums; Hanneman pulled it back out, reshaped the arrangement and handed it to Lombardo. A Hanneman song called "Final Six" was originally slated for the album and was for a brief moment going to be its title, but Araya's mid-session gall bladder surgery on 5 May 2006 ate the time he needed to finish the vocals, and the song was pushed to the 2007 digipak instead.
Creating the Album
Tracking ran from 28 February to April 2006, split between NRG Recording Studios in North Hollywood and Westlake Recording Studios in Los Angeles, with the files moved between rooms on disk rather than tape. Abraham produced and mixed, with John Ewing Jr. on engineering, Ryan Williams handling mixing engineering, Dave Colvin assisting at NRG and Brian Warwick assisting at Westlake. The album was mixed at Pulse Recording in Los Angeles and mastered by Vlado Meller at Sony Music Studios in New York. Rick Rubin still took the executive producer credit. King's account of Rubin's involvement, given to Ultimate Guitar in August 2006, is blunt: he could not recall Rubin being in the room, and the only meaningful Rubin contributions came as suggestions during the final mix.
The technical decisions on the album were largely King's. As on the previous two Slayer records, he laid down every rhythm guitar track himself, double-tracking through a Marshall JCM 800 that served as the foundational sound across the whole album. Hanneman handled all lead guitars except on "Catalyst" and "Consfearacy", where King took the solos. The single biggest sonic change between Christ Illusion and the Bostaph-era records is on the drums. Lombardo plays the album with the heel-up double-kick technique he has used since 1983, on a Tama kit, and the choice of two bass drums rather than a single drum with a double pedal sits at the centre of why the record feels looser and breathier than God Hates Us All.
"Lombardo's influence on this band is absolutely undeniable. He is simply essential to the Slayer sound. He is one of metal's all-around best drummers, perhaps the very best in the field of thrash/speed metal."
Don Kaye, Blabbermouth review of Christ Illusion, 2006
Recording was disrupted twice. The first time was the 6/6/06 marketing fiasco. Christ Illusion had been booked, half-seriously, for a release on the sixth day of the sixth month of the sixth year of the decade, a date the remake of The Omen and a small army of metal records were also chasing. King later said the band scrapped the date because too many other bands had piled onto the gag; USA Today reported the actual reason was that Slayer had not booked enough studio time to finish in time. The second was Araya's gall bladder operation on 5 May, which knocked the Unholy Alliance Tour back from a 6 June kick-off in San Diego to 10 June and cost the band the vocals for "Final Six".
Personnel and Credits
The personnel listing on Christ Illusion is the cleanest Slayer credit page in over a decade: no guest vocalists, no string arrangers, no producer-as-player surprises. The interesting stories live in the production roles.
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Slayer | ||
| Vocals, bass | Tom Araya | Vocals tracked at NRG before and after his 5 May gall bladder surgery |
| Lead guitars | Jeff Hanneman | All leads except on "Catalyst" and "Consfearacy" |
| Lead and rhythm guitars | Kerry King | All rhythm tracks on the album; leads on "Catalyst" and "Consfearacy"; main amp a Marshall JCM 800 |
| Drums | Dave Lombardo | First Slayer studio album since Seasons in the Abyss (1990); Tama kit, twin kick drums, heel-up technique |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Executive producer | Rick Rubin | Credit only; King has said Rubin was not present for the sessions and contributed mainly suggestions during the final mix |
| Producer, mixer | Josh Abraham | Best known at the time for Velvet Revolver's Contraband and 30 Seconds to Mars' A Beautiful Lie |
| Engineer | John Ewing Jr. | Tracking at NRG and Westlake |
| Mixing engineer | Ryan Williams | Mixing at Pulse Recording, Los Angeles |
| Assistant engineer (NRG) | Dave Colvin | |
| Assistant engineer (Westlake) | Brian Warwick | |
| Mastering | Vlado Meller | Sony Music Studios, New York City |
| Guitar tech, bass tech | Armand B. Crump | |
| Drum tech | Norm Costa | |
| Artwork | ||
| Cover art | Larry Carroll | Returning after Reign in Blood (1986), South of Heaven (1988) and Seasons in the Abyss (1990); original painted on a four-by-four-foot wood panel |
| Art direction, design | t42design | Standard edition |
| Photography | Josh Victor Rothstein | |
| Art direction, special edition | Krucified Kittens | Digipak release |
The Lombardo line is the one that counts. Across the previous decade, two drummers had filled in for him on four studio albums, and the band's identity had drifted accordingly. Christ Illusion is the first time King, Hanneman and Araya had recorded with their original drummer since 1990. King told Blender he had been sceptical when Lombardo first came back for live shows in 2002, saying "I thought he was not up to snuff", but said he was "blown away" once Lombardo started rehearsals.
The Songs
Christ Illusion is a ten-song, thirty-eight-minute record built for sequencing. Lombardo described it as "a matured Reign in Blood"; King has called it "a mix between God Hates Us All and Seasons in the Abyss." Both descriptions hold up.
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "Flesh Storm" | King | 4:14 | Opener; thrash-tempo with King solo | |
| 2 | "Catalyst" | Hanneman | 3:07 | Reworked from a song originally demoed for God Hates Us All with Bostaph on drums; one of two tracks where King takes the lead | |
| 3 | "Skeleton Christ" | King | 4:22 | Premiered on BBC Radio 1's Mike Davis Rock Show on 1 August 2006; lyrics cited by the Catholic Secular Forum as an "insult to Christianity" | |
| 4 | "Eyes of the Insane" | Lyrics: Araya; Music: Hanneman | 3:23 | Yes (20 Nov 2006) | Inspired by Texas Monthly's "Casualties of War" feature on US soldiers with PTSD; Grammy winner for Best Metal Performance, 2007 |
| 5 | "Jihad" | Lyrics: Hanneman, Araya; Music: Hanneman | 3:31 | Written from the perspective of a 9/11 hijacker; cut from Slayer's Jimmy Kimmel Live appearance for content reasons | |
| 6 | "Consfearacy" | King | 3:07 | The album's other King-led solo track; described in 2007 Sun-Sentinel coverage as a "government hating song" | |
| 7 | "Catatonic" | Hanneman | 4:54 | Longest track on the standard edition | |
| 8 | "Black Serenade" | Lyrics: Hanneman, Araya; Music: Hanneman | 3:16 | Alternate version on the special edition | |
| 9 | "Cult" | King | 4:40 | Yes (6 Jun 2006) | First single; King has described its subject as religion in America, "the biggest cult in the world"; previewed on the Eternal Pyre EP |
| 10 | "Supremist" | King | 3:51 | Closer; Rolling Stone's Chris Steffen singled it out as the album's strongest moment in an otherwise scathing review | |
| 11 | "Final Six" (bonus) | Lyrics: Araya, Hanneman; Music: Hanneman | 4:10 | Added to 2007 digipak; originally meant for the standard edition before Araya's gall bladder surgery; Grammy winner for Best Metal Performance, 2008; also appeared on the Punisher: War Zone soundtrack in 2008 |
The four pieces that do the heaviest lifting are "Flesh Storm", "Eyes of the Insane", "Jihad" and "Cult". "Cult" was the public face of the campaign. King wrote it as a comment on what he sees as the cult-like properties of organised religion in the United States, gave it a hooked, mid-tempo chorus that lives close to the territory of South of Heaven, and let it ride for a month as an Eternal Pyre EP exclusive before the album landed. "Eyes of the Insane" is the surprise winner of the record. Hanneman wrote the music, Araya wrote the lyrics after reading the Texas Monthly piece, and the song was given a Tony Petrossian-directed video released on 30 October 2006. It was placed on the Saw III soundtrack the same month, and four months later it won the band their first Grammy.
"Jihad" did the opposite of what Araya and the label expected. Hanneman wrote the bulk of it, but the closing spoken-word section is delivered in the voice of one of the attackers and lifts directly from material attributed to Mohamed Atta. King's defence, given to Blabbermouth, was that the song behaves like "Angel of Death" did, narrating a horror rather than endorsing it. Araya later admitted to Metal-rules that he had expected a serious US backlash and was almost surprised when one failed to materialise; the song, he reasoned, was just "Slayer being Slayer". The American backlash never came. The Indian one did.
B-sides, Outtakes and Lost Songs
"Final Six" is the clearest outtake-that-came-good in the Slayer catalogue. Originally slated for the album proper, then briefly proposed as the album's title, then dropped because Araya's vocal sessions were interrupted by surgery, it surfaced in three places: the special edition digipak in July 2007, the soundtrack for Punisher: War Zone in 2008, and the trophy cabinet, when it won the 2008 Grammy for Best Metal Performance, making it back-to-back wins in that category from the same recording campaign.
The other genuine extra on the special edition is an alternate version of "Black Serenade". Beyond that, the digipak's bonus DVD bundles together a short tour documentary, "Slayer on Tour '07", the official "Eyes of the Insane" video, and a live version of "South of Heaven" lifted from the Unholy Alliance DVD. The Eternal Pyre EP, released exclusively through Hot Topic in the US on 6 June 2006 and through Nuclear Blast as a thousand-copy 7" picture disc on 30 June, previewed "Cult", paired it with a German live recording of "War Ensemble", and included video footage of the band recording "Cult". It entered the Swedish chart at number 48 and the Finnish chart at number 2.
- Eternal Pyre EP, 6 June 2006: "Cult", live "War Ensemble", recording footage; 5,000 Hot Topic copies sold out within hours.
- Eternal Pyre 7" picture disc, 30 June 2006: 1,000 copies via Nuclear Blast.
- Christ Illusion 6/6/06 commemorative T-shirt: 666 units only, retailing at $16.66 through the band's webstore.
- Christ Illusion special edition digipak, July 2007: adds "Final Six", alternate "Black Serenade", and a bonus DVD.
- "Final Six" on the Punisher: War Zone Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, 2008.
Album Artwork and Packaging
Larry Carroll had painted three of the most recognisable record sleeves in metal (Reign in Blood, South of Heaven and Seasons in the Abyss) and had spent the intervening fifteen years working largely outside the music industry. The band approached him in early 2006 with two prompts: the album title, and a fragment of King's lyric, "Christ in a sea of despair". Carroll worked from track titles and rough lyric sheets only, and produced the original on a four-by-four-foot wood slab using mixed media.
An early version of the image read, in Kerry King's words, as if Christ was "chilling out in the water". The painting was revised to the version that shipped: Christ with one missing eye, both hands amputated at the wrists, standing in a sea of blood and severed heads. Araya's verdict on the final image was that "he looked like a drug addict!", which he meant approvingly. King liked the painting enough to buy the original. Carroll signed ten lithographs of the artwork that were given away as pre-order prizes, and an alternate, non-graphic cover was prepared and shipped to retailers who refused to stock the original; a third, censored sleeve removed the offending imagery altogether. The special edition was art-directed by Krucified Kittens.
Release and Reception
Christ Illusion arrived on 8 August 2006 and sold 62,000 copies in its first week in the United States, debuting at number 5 on the Billboard 200. That was the band's highest US chart debut to that point, beating Divine Intervention's number 8 entry in 1994. It dropped to number 44 the following week (Slayer's chart pattern has always been front-loaded) but in pure debut-week terms it remained their commercial peak until World Painted Blood reset the bar three years later. The album reached number 2 in Germany and Finland, number 3 in Canada, number 4 in Sweden, number 6 in Austria, number 8 in the Netherlands, number 9 in Australia and Poland, and number 23 on the UK Albums Chart while topping the UK Rock & Metal Albums Chart.
Critically, the album landed at the favourable end of mixed. Metacritic aggregated a 72 from twenty-one reviews. Thom Jurek's AllMusic verdict became the standard line.
"Raging, forward-thinking heavy metal melding with hardcore thrash. Christ Illusion marks a return to what made Slayer such a breath of fresh air in the first place."
Thom Jurek, AllMusic review of Christ Illusion, 2006
Ben Ratliff at The New York Times went further, calling Christ Illusion "the most concentrated, focused Slayer record in 20 years" and noting its "kind of demented gravity". Adrien Begrand at PopMatters gave it an 8/10 and ranked it the fifteenth best metal album of 2006, calling it "Slayer's best album in sixteen years and their most thought-provoking work to date." Decibel called it "their most vital album in years." The Observer's Chris Campion judged it "their most rigorously conceived and focused for years."
Not everyone agreed. The Guardian's Jamie Thomson awarded the album two stars and complained that the band still sounded "unwilling to ditch the nu-metal tendencies that have made much of their recent output so resistible." Rolling Stone's Chris Steffen was the most cutting, writing that the album "mines much of the same territory as its predecessor, God Hates Us All, just without the memorable riffs" and singling out Lombardo as the one undeniable strength. KNAC's Peter Atkinson wrote that the record "demands OUTRAGE more calculatingly so than any other album the band has done."
Three weeks after release, Slayer were inducted into the Kerrang! Hall of Fame. In 2007 they collected the Metal Hammer Golden Gods Icon Award and "Eyes of the Insane" lost the Golden Gods Best Video category. The 2006 Metal Storm Awards gave Christ Illusion its Best Thrash Metal Album. Revolver readers, polled at the start of 2007, named Slayer "Best Live Band" and "Best Band Ever", with Lombardo "Best Drummer".
Singles and Music Videos
The single rollout was unusually long for a Slayer record. "Cult" was effectively pre-released as the Eternal Pyre EP exclusive on 6 June 2006, two months ahead of the album. "Eyes of the Insane" was the only proper post-release single, issued on 20 November 2006 alongside its Tony Petrossian-directed video, which had been released to the internet on 30 October. The Cult and Eternal Pyre rollout drew its own controversy in California: in late July 2006, the city of Fullerton demanded that seventeen Christ Illusion-branded bus benches be removed because city officials objected to the band name (they assumed it referred to a murderer) and the antichrist-and-skull artwork. The company that had installed the benches took them down. Slayer placed two further tracks online during the build-up, "Jihad" and "Eyes of the Insane", through the Spanish site Rafabasa in late June, and the BBC Radio 1 rock show premiered "Skeleton Christ" on 1 August.
| Single | Release date | Director | Chart |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Cult" | 6 June 2006 (as Eternal Pyre EP) | EP charted at 2 in Finland, 48 in Sweden | |
| "Eyes of the Insane" | 20 November 2006 | Tony Petrossian | Won 2007 Grammy for Best Metal Performance |
Touring and Live
The Unholy Alliance Tour underpinned the entire Christ Illusion cycle. The first leg was originally booked to launch in San Diego on 6 June 2006 alongside the failed 6/6/06 release stunt, but Araya's gall bladder surgery on 5 May pushed the launch back to 10 June. The North American support package was a who's-who of mid-2000s extreme metal (In Flames, Mastodon, Children of Bodom and Lamb of God) with London's Hammersmith Apollo gig adding Tom Araya's brother Johnny's band Thine Eyes Bleed and Ted Maul to the bill. After running through North America and Europe, the same package (minus Thine Eyes Bleed) regrouped to play Japan's Loudpark Festival on 15 October 2006.
The press push that followed was the most TV-heavy of Slayer's career. The band played their first ever network television appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on 19 January 2007, performing "Eyes of the Insane" plus a four-song post-broadcast set for the audience; the channel cut the "Jihad" footage for content. A week earlier they had played a private show at the US Air Force's 52nd Services Squadron at Spangdahlem in Germany, their first ever visit to a military base. In April 2007, the band toured Australia and New Zealand with Mastodon, then played Download, Rock am Ring and a summer co-headline run with Marilyn Manson and Bleeding Through, and in late 2008 came back through Europe on Unholy Alliance: Chapter III with Trivium, Mastodon and Amon Amarth. The Christ Illusion campaign quietly bled straight into the recording sessions for World Painted Blood.
- The Unholy Alliance Tour, summer 2006, North America and Europe: In Flames, Mastodon, Children of Bodom, Lamb of God, Thine Eyes Bleed.
- Loudpark Festival, Saitama Super Arena, Japan, 15 October 2006: Unholy Alliance reunion bill.
- The Henry Rollins Show, IFC, July 2006: live "Cult" performance.
- Jimmy Kimmel Live!, ABC, 19 January 2007: first US network TV appearance.
- Download Festival and Rock am Ring 2007.
- Unholy Alliance: Chapter III European tour, October to November 2008, with Trivium, Mastodon and Amon Amarth.
In TV, Film and Media
"Eyes of the Insane" carried the album's footprint outside heavy music. The song was placed on the Saw III soundtrack in October 2006 and, with the Grammy following four months later, became the most widely heard Slayer song since "Raining Blood" found its way onto the South Park "Die Hippie, Die" episode in 2005. "Final Six" was placed on the soundtrack to Punisher: War Zone in 2008. Christ Illusion is not, by Slayer standards, a sync-rich record, but those two placements were enough to put the band in a wider conversation than they had been in for the previous decade.
Controversy, Censorship and the India Ban
The cover art and lyrics of Christ Illusion drew complaints from the moment the artwork went online in June 2006. World Entertainment News Network reported organised Christian-group objections through the summer. The serious move came from Mumbai. Joseph Dias, general secretary of the Catholic Secular Forum, issued a memorandum to the Mumbai police commissioner taking "strong exception" to the original artwork, the lyrics of "Skeleton Christ" (which he called "an insult to Christianity"), and the lyrics of "Jihad" (which he argued would offend "the sensibilities of the Muslims, and secular Indians who have respect for all faiths"). EMI India met with the Forum, apologised for releasing the record, and recalled it. On 11 October 2006, EMI announced that all Indian stocks had been destroyed and that the company had no plans to reissue the record in India. The BBC ran the story under the headline "'Offensive' album pulled in India".
"In America every band under the sun has written their 9/11 song. And that's why I didn't want to have any part of it, but this is really cool."
Kerry King on "Jihad", Blabbermouth, 2006
That episode is by some distance the largest single act of post-release censorship in Slayer's career. It is also, by Joseph Dias' own framing in the Forum's memorandum, what triggered the recall: the album cover, two song titles, and a single spoken-word coda. Slayer responded by doing nothing in particular. The non-graphic alternate cover was already in circulation for the same reason in US retail, and the band continued to play "Jihad" live across the Unholy Alliance dates without an audible American backlash. Araya's later read on that absence, given to Metal-rules in December 2006, was that the US press had long ago stopped taking Slayer literally enough to be offended by them.
One older controversy resurfaced briefly around the album. The Elyse Pahler civil suit against the band, dismissed in 2001 on free speech and foreseeability grounds, was raked back up in some 2006 press as part of the wider "Slayer-make-them-do-bad-things" framing. It went nowhere. The Forum's intervention in Mumbai, by contrast, succeeded.
Covers, Samples and Tributes
Christ Illusion is recent enough, and protected enough by the band's legal apparatus, that it has not generated the cover-version industry that surrounds Reign in Blood. The most widely circulated covers of Christ Illusion material remain Slayer's own live re-recordings, particularly the Unholy Alliance DVD versions of "Cult" and "Eyes of the Insane". Lombardo himself, asked in 2022 to name his three favourite Slayer songs, picked tracks from the EP era ("Captor of Sin"), the second Lombardo-departure album (South of Heaven's "Ghosts of War"), and World Painted Blood ("Beauty Through Order"), none of them from Christ Illusion, which is a tell in itself about how he sees the record's place in his own discography.
Reissues, Remasters and Anniversaries
The major reissue of Christ Illusion is the July 2007 special edition digipak, which added "Final Six", an alternate version of "Black Serenade", and a bonus DVD containing the "Slayer on Tour '07" documentary, the "Eyes of the Insane" music video and a live "South of Heaven" lifted from Unholy Alliance. A 2013 CD reissue was put out by Universal Music Russia. There has been no twentieth-anniversary box set as of mid-2026, no Atmos remix and no half-speed master vinyl pressing. Given the album's importance to the band's late-period chart history and to Lombardo's recorded output, an anniversary reissue in or around 2026 would surprise nobody, but as of this writing nothing has been announced.
Legacy and Influence
Three things changed for Slayer because of Christ Illusion. First, it ended the Bostaph era on record. From this album on, Lombardo would be the recorded drummer on every Slayer studio album that followed (World Painted Blood, 2009), until his third departure in February 2013 over the same pay disputes that had punctuated his earlier exits. Second, the Grammy door finally opened. After three previous nominations across the Bostaph and Diabolus-era recordings, Slayer collected back-to-back Best Metal Performance wins for "Eyes of the Insane" (2007) and "Final Six" (2008), both songs that came out of the Christ Illusion sessions. Third, the record made Slayer a top-five Billboard band, a status no one in 1986 would have predicted for an act whose third album had been declined by their own distributor over a song about Mengele.
The album also did some quieter cultural work. It is the one Slayer record where Lombardo's playing was, in the consensus of the contemporary press, the headline rather than the back-end. Don Kaye's Blabbermouth line, "perhaps the very best in the field of thrash/speed metal", is the framing that stuck. By the time Slayer announced their farewell tour in January 2018, Lombardo had already been gone for nearly five years, but the lineup of Araya, King, Hanneman and Lombardo that appears on the Christ Illusion sleeve had become, retrospectively, the canonical Slayer photograph. Hanneman would die on 2 May 2013 from alcohol-related cirrhosis. World Painted Blood ended up being the last record on which both Hanneman and Lombardo played, but Christ Illusion is the album where they came back to that lineup with something to prove.
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The 666 T-shirt | To mark the abandoned 6/6/06 release date, Slayer's webstore sold a Christ Illusion T-shirt limited to 666 units at exactly $16.66 each. |
| The Texas Monthly connection | The lyrics for the Grammy-winning "Eyes of the Insane" were written by Tom Araya after reading "Casualties of War", a feature in Texas Monthly about returning US soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder. |
| Catalyst's first life | "Catalyst" was originally recorded for God Hates Us All in 2001 with Paul Bostaph on drums, then shelved, rewritten by Hanneman and re-recorded for Christ Illusion with Lombardo. |
| The album that was nearly called Final Six | Araya told George Stroumboulopoulos on Canada's The Hour that the album's title was "Final Six". King had to walk it back on KROQ-FM days later, joking that his vote on the title had been "overlooked". |
| The Slap in the F-ing Face | Slayer wanted Rick Rubin to produce Christ Illusion. Rubin chose Metallica's Death Magnetic sessions instead, which Kerry King later publicly described as a "slap in the fucking face." |
| Lombardo's silent demo run | The album's pre-production stretched back to 2003, with Lombardo and King cutting two demos at Lombardo's home before any label or producer was attached. |
| The Fullerton bus benches | In late July 2006 the California city of Fullerton ordered seventeen Christ Illusion bus-bench adverts torn down because city officials thought the band name referred to a murderer and disliked the antichrist-and-skull artwork. |
| The Spangdahlem show | A week before their first ever US network TV slot on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Slayer played a private gig for the 52nd Services Squadron at Spangdahlem US Air Force Base in Germany, their first ever performance at a military base. |
| Jihad got cut from late-night TV | When Slayer played Jimmy Kimmel Live! on 19 January 2007, they performed five songs in total; "Eyes of the Insane" was broadcast, but the show pulled the "Jihad" footage over its lyrical content. |
| The St Joseph's vandalism | The unaffiliated National Day of Slayer organisation took credit for inspiring a 6 June 2006 vandalism attack on St Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, New York, which left a pentagram, inverted crosses and the words "Reign in Blood" sprayed on the grounds. |
| The Eternal Pyre Hot Topic sell-out | The Eternal Pyre EP, released through Hot Topic stores on 6 June 2006 in a run of 5,000 copies, sold out within hours of release. |
| The Rolling Stone caveat | Rolling Stone's Chris Steffen panned the record but specifically singled out Lombardo, writing that "at least their awesome drummer Dave Lombardo shows off some chops, particularly on the raging 'Supremist'." |
Listen on Riffology
If you want this album with two voices over the top of it, the Riffology podcast covers Slayer at depth: Reign in Blood, the Hell Awaits and South of Heaven trilogy, the Bostaph years, and the Lombardo returns. Episodes are available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Pocket Casts and every major platform. Subscribe, leave a rating if you like what you hear, and let us know in the show notes which Slayer album you want pulled apart next.
