Interview with Tom Araya about the new album.
From KNAC.COM, May 2001.

Have you ever seen the famed former residence of the great magician Harry Houdini? Nestled in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles, the mansion exudes a foreboding presence around the general vicinity even on the clearest and brightest of days. Considering that the house is known to be haunted and also hosted the demise of Anton Szandor LaVey, everybody's favorite founder of the Church of Satan, it's not surprising that the members of Slayer chose the location to conduct a whirlwind round of interviews about their upcoming release, God Hates Us All.

I still haven't figured out why there was an inordinate amount of empty porno video boxes littered throughout the upstairs bedrooms. Moving on.

We needn't bother with the normal humdrum bio info because, if you're the dedicated KNAC.COM listener that you are, you already know all you need to know about Slayer, their history and why Haunting The Chapel is the benchmark, genre definer that so many aspire to reach but fail to achieve. And if you don't know any of this, well then a thousand curses on your damnable, pathetic soul!

KNAC.COM: What's new in the Slayer camp?

TOM ARAYA: We just finished up the new record. It's done and we should have something for you to listen to here.

KNAC.COM: Did Rick Rubin produce this album?

TOM: No, Matt Hyde did who also produced "Bloodline" for us. We worked with Rubin but it was more on a supervisory level. [Starting with Reign In Blood] he cleaned up and established the "Slayer sound" - that very raw sound, very minimal. Anything we do in the studio, if we can't do it live, we're not going to do it. The only tape we run is an intro tape.

KNAC.COM: From the tracks I've already heard, it's a straightforward, no-fucking-around Slayer record. Group effort?

TOM: Every record has someone who's a dominating force in that record because the other ones for some reason aren't jiving with coming up with shit. Like on this one, I had stuff written but this is a democratic band. If it doesn't get used, it doesn't get used period. Kerry wrote a lot of the stuff. Jeff wrote two songs, lyrically, for this album and Kerry wrote the rest. This time around, Kerry obviously had more inner turmoil and came up with a lot of good shit.

KNAC.COM: What kind of topics do you find yourself addressing when you write?

TOM: It depends. If I'm reading something and it inspires a thought, I'll write it down. When I'm done reading a book and if some things come to me, I'll write about the impressions I've gotten from something I just read.

KNAC.COM: Is there a common theme to the new album?

TOM: (Laughs) Yeah, hate. Hate is the running theme throughout all the songs it seems. The title, God Hates Us All, is right in line with the other Slayer albums. The label was like, "do you guys really believe this?" There's a little truth in everything we write, as far as religion goes. My parents still go to church and some of my family members go to church, but I don't.

KNAC.COM: I like how "7 Faces" is a commentary on the Seven Deadly Sins.

TOM: You got it right. "I look in the mirror, I see 7 faces and they look a lot like me." That's one of Kerry's songs that when I saw the lyrics, I was blown away. "Cast Down" is another great one.

KNAC.COM: You're including "Here Comes The Pain" on album too.

TOM: That was a WCW song. A lot of stuff went on with Tommy Boy Records. We took it upon ourselves to say, "Listen, we're gonna re-release this on our album because you didn't live up [to your end]." When you do things, you do things with agreements and signed contracts. That's how we felt. We felt that we needed to give this song an opportunity that Tommy Boy didn't.

KNAC.COM: Is there a common theme to the new album?

TOM: Yeah, hate.

KNAC.COM: Where've y'all been the last three years? It seems to have been a three-year break?

TOM: We didn't take a three-year break. When Diabolus In Musica came out, we did a tour of the States, we did a tour of Europe and then came home. We started working on stuff and then we got an offer to do a WWF tune - "War Zone" and then we did "Bloodline" for the Dracula 2000 soundtrack. Prior to that we did "Here Comes The Pain" and "Hand Of Doom" for the Black Sabbath tribute album. Then we continued writing and then the Tattoo The Earth Tour came up. It was good offer and it was a new thing so it was all about experience.

KNAC.COM: Do you feel that Slayer has progressed musically since the days of Show No Mercy while some of your contemporaries, like the bands formerly known as Megadeth and Metallica, have chosen drastically altered musical directions in the name of progression?

TOM: (Laughs) Damn, can you repeat that question? I'll get you this time around. We have progressed. We've progressed as songwriters but it's more of a maturing if anything. Lyrically, I think we've matured quite a bit. Musically, I think we have too. You come to the realization that music doesn't have to be complex. It can be simple and still give you the illusion that it's complex. To me, that's how we've grown in that fashion. In a sense, it's become more acceptable. I think we've gained acceptance and it's a broader acceptance now. We've got this tour we're going to do with Pantera which we hope will definitely be an eye opener for a lot of kids who've never had the chance to see Slayer. There's a whole new crop of kids out there. The last record we released was three years ago, right?

KNAC.COM: With bands like Pantera and Morbid Angel on the bill, this tour appears to be what Ozzfest, in theory, should be. Most of the bands are horrible radio-friendly KROQ bands.

TOM: That's probably why we're not on it. We're not a KROQ band. It's all about touring. That's the only true thing that if kids come see your show and they're fucking blown away, they walk away thinking, "Man, the next time they come to town, I'm gonna go see their show." That's what we have to rely on and hope that three years later they haven't forgotten. (Laughing) "Yeah, I wanted to come see this.who did we want to see again?" That's basically how kids are these days.

KNAC.COM: It's information overload.

TOM: They're getting it from everywhere. We have to rely on word of mouth, in my opinion. No radio stations will play us even with the music they're playing now. They still won't play us.

"Slayer's like a snake that slithers on through life. We get on top of the game and sometimes we crawl under it but when we're always there slithering through life."

KNAC.COM: You mean the new album doesn't have any radio-friendly commercialized "mommy and daddy didn't hug me enough" rhetoric?

TOM: Yeah, these new songs aren't like that. I've had to sing them several million times to get the right takes. For the tour, we're going to try to play what we consider the "hit songs" because that's the audience we're expecting. We're going to put together the songs that will be a little more recognizable. We've only got 50 minutes. We'll do three short little sets where I'll talk in the very beginning and two other times. To me the show just moves quicker with high energy when you mumble a few words and then you play five songs, mumble a few words, and play 10 songs in a row. We're trying to generate ideas for our stage set right now so that it's memorable.

KNAC.COM: Do you think metal is experiencing a commercial renaissance?

TOM: In a way, yes. When the media starts printing that there's a resurgence of metal, what happens? People believe it so they go out and start buying metal albums. [So they think] they've created this big resurgence of metal. The media creates these things and sometimes it'll catch and sometimes it won't. Like you said, Slayer's like a snake that slithers on through life. We get on top of the game and sometimes we crawl under it but when we're always there slithering through life.

KNAC.COM: Reign In Blood is one of those albums, in my opinion, that ranks up there with other albums that defined thrash metal like Metallica's Master of Puppets, Anthrax's Among The Living, and Exodus' Bonded By Blood. Was there a specific moment that y'all felt that y'all reached the top of the mountain?

TOM: I don't think we've ever really gotten off. I think we're still there. In our own way, we're still at the top. You hear a lot of the stuff out there today - the heaviness of music. The heaviness wasn't there until we came around - the same with Metallica, Anthrax, Exodus and us. I think we've had a big impact on the sound. We took music and made it really heavy and I think it's affected a lot of music from then on.