The kings of extreme metal have completed work on album number 11. The as-yet-untitled album will be Slayer’s first without the titan Jeff Hanneman to the fold – it will most probably not be the last though!
As guitarist Kerry King states in his recent interview for VH1 classic’s That Metal Show, he wrote all of the material with the exception of the song Piano Wire which is taken off the recording sessions for Slayer’s previous album, 2009’s World Painted Blood. “We had (Paul) Bostaph play drums to the existing track. Tom (Araya) re-sang it. So that’s Jeff’s contribution to this record. It’s his writing (and) I think the assumption was, it’s Jeff’s song, we recorded it for the ‘World Painted Blood’ tracks, (it’s) assumed Jeff played on it, but as everybody knows, I’ve done Jeff’s rhythm tracks (on Slayer albums) since the ’90s. And he has no lead on it, so it’s only me” King clarifies.
“And then on the follow-up — assuming there is as a follow-up — we have another one (of Hanneman’s songs) that we don’t have lyrics for yet”.
And it looks like the follow-up is already in the making! “”What people don’t know [is that] beyond (the new Slayer album), there’s six more (songs) towards the next one that are already recorded. So we did a lot… When Jeff got injured, I started making up boatloads of stuff, because I didn’t know, if Jeff contributed at all, how much he was gonna contribute. So I just took it upon myself to say, ‘Hey, man, if I get too much stuff, good for me.’ It turns out Jeff didn’t contribute anymore”.
Should be interesting…
