Now that Slayer is on the road for their first North American tour since Jeff Hanneman’s passing, the band are giving interviews. Obviously, people are asking about the status of the next Slayer album, which was in the works before their guitarist’s untimely death. Kerry King spoke to Canada’s Metro, where he essentially said that the band is going to stay the course. “To me, it will be business as usual as it can be,” he told the paper. “Usually be the time and idea was presented, I’d have finished it or Jeff would have it finished, so they were essentially finished songs. We’ll just more forward like that.”
King says that they’ve got 14 songs to choose from and seven of them already have lyrics finished “I’m way ahead of the game compared to where I was for World Painted Blood,” he said. He also found some time to trash-talk Metallica. “How many fans do you think Metallica pissed off when they did Load and Reload? Poeple like Slayer because it’s Slayer. You grow as a musician within your genre, not try and flip genres and become something else.”
One thing the next album will probably feature is some solos from Exodus’ Gary Holt, who’s been touring with the band since early 2011. Although don’t expect to hear any Holt compositions on Slayer album #12.
We’ve always been a two guitar attack, so if you’re looking to have a segment like the ‘Angel Of Death’ lead trade-off, you can’t do that with one guitar. As far as Gary being a contributing writer, number one, fans aren’t ready for it, and number two, that’s like throwing somebody to the wolves. I think if there’s another record after this one and Gary is still with us at that point, I think that will be a time where I say, ‘Hey dude, feel free to throw any riffs my way if you’re interested’.”
People would probably be more interested in hearing anything that Hanneman had left over than Holt, most likely. But we’d think that there are many out there that would want to hear the dynamic of a new guitarist contributing to the band. Guess that will have to wait until album number 13.
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