Slayer came to an end last year and we at Wikimetal already miss them. We've talked a lot about the band here, and at the beginning of the month, on June 3rd, Kerry King , and we couldn't let the date pass by unnoticed, right?
To celebrate, we revisited the band's discography and the question arose: what is Slayer's best album? So we left that question up to you to vote on, and the result was the classic Reign in Blood . The album won by a landslide with 46% of the votes, surpassing Seasons in the Abyss (1990), which had 16% of the votes, and South of Heaven (1988), with 12%.
Released in 1986, the album was very well received by critics and fans from day one, bringing Slayer into the metal mainstream. Despite being largely ignored by radio stations, Reign in Blood was the band's first album to enter the Billboard 200 , debuting at #127 and peaking at #94, a major achievement for the genre.
When asked about why the album is still so popular, and the fans' favorite as confirmed in the current poll, King said in an interview: “It was all a matter of timing; a change in sound. In thrash metal, there hadn't yet been a good production on an album like that. It was a series of things that all came together at the same time. I think, musically, it was ahead of its time. Nobody was ready to hear it. If Reign in Blood were released today, nobody would care about it. But back then, people were hungry for something like that, so much so that it 'took off'.”
Reign in Blood was produced by the legendary Rick Rubin and is only 29 minutes long with ten songs. The strong and powerful cover was designed by Larry Carroll at Rubin's invitation, who gave him free rein to create whatever he wanted as long as it had "something on a goat's head," and so the illustrator delivered one of the most controversial metal covers to date.
How about listening to it yourself now?
