40 years of Reign in Blood: the day Slayer changed the meaning of extreme

There are albums that become classics. There are albums that define a genre. And then there are albums that make everything that came before them suddenly sound different.

On this day, October 7, 1986, Slayer released Reign in Blood.

Twenty-eight minutes and fifty-eight seconds of speed, distortion, double-kick drumming, screaming vocals and riffs that seemed determined to leave absolutely no oxygen in the room. It was short, brutal and almost impossibly intense. It was also a turning point: for thrash metal, for extreme metal and, perhaps more importantly, for the generations of musicians who would soon begin pushing metal into even darker and more extreme territory.

Forty years later, Reign in Blood still sounds dangerous.

That is quite an achievement for a record released in 1986.
To understand why it mattered, it helps to understand what thrash metal actually was.
The genre had emerged in the early 1980s from a collision of traditional heavy metal, the speed and precision of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and the raw aggression of punk and hardcore. San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York became important centres of a scene that was faster, louder and considerably less interested in the conventions of mainstream rock.
The bands at its centre would eventually become known as the Big Four: Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax.

They did not sound identical.
In fact, that was part of the point.
Metallica brought epic arrangements and an increasingly sophisticated songwriting approach.
Megadeth developed a technical, chaotic and often politically charged version of thrash.
Anthrax mixed speed and aggression with humour, hardcore influences and a distinctly New York attitude.
Slayer took the darkest and most violent elements of the emerging style and pushed them almost to the point of extremity.

The four bands were therefore not simply four versions of the same idea. Together, they represented the explosive breadth of thrash metal.
And 1986 was arguably the year when that explosion reached its peak.
Metallica released Master of Puppets. Megadeth released Peace Sells…but Who’s Buying?. Slayer released Reign in Blood. Anthrax would follow a few months later with Among the Living.

It was an extraordinary moment in metal history. Grammy has described 1986 as the year in which thrash reached its tipping point, with those records helping establish the template for the years that followed.
But Slayer were about to take the formula somewhere nobody else quite had.
By the time they entered the studio for Reign in Blood, Slayer were already established as one of the most extreme bands in the American metal underground. Their first album, Show No Mercy, had appeared in 1983, followed by Hell Awaits in 1985, a darker and more elaborate record that showed the band becoming increasingly ambitious.

Then came Rick Rubin.

The decision to work with Rubin was almost bizarre on paper. He was better known for hip-hop and for the burgeoning Def Jam label than for heavy metal. Yet that outsider perspective turned out to be exactly what Slayer needed.
Rubin stripped away much of the excess. The songs became shorter, faster and more direct. The production was clearer and more punchy, allowing every guitar attack and every drum hit to cut through the mix. The result was not polished in the conventional sense. It was sharpened.
And the band did not exactly arrive at the studio with a plan to create a 29-minute album.
They simply wrote songs that did not waste time.
The finished record contained ten tracks and lasted less than half an hour. When the band realised how short it was, there was apparently some concern that they had not actually made enough music for an album. Rubin disagreed. Ten songs were ten songs. There was no need to add unnecessary material simply to make the record longer.

It was a decision that now seems almost perfectly Slayer.
Reign in Blood begins with “Angel of Death”, and within seconds the listener is confronted with one of the most recognisable opening attacks in metal history. Jeff Hanneman’s music and lyrics about Josef Mengele and the atrocities of Auschwitz immediately generated controversy, while Tom Araya’s voice sounded less like conventional singing than an alarm being activated inside a burning building.
The controversy surrounding “Angel of Death” contributed to the album’s complicated release history. Columbia, which distributed Def Jam, was unwilling to handle the record because of the song’s subject matter. Geffen ultimately distributed it, with October 7, 1986 commonly given as the release date.

But the album was much more than its opening track.
“Piece by Piece”, “Necrophobic”, “Altar of Sacrifice”, “Jesus Saves”, “Criminally Insane”, “Reborn”, “Epidemic” and “Postmortem” arrive almost without allowing the listener to recover.
And then comes “Raining Blood”.
The final track is arguably the most famous Slayer song of them all. It begins not with a riff but with the sound of rain, creating an eerie pause before the guitars arrive. The effect is extraordinary precisely because of the contrast: after nearly half an hour of relentless violence, the storm seems almost cinematic.
Then the riff arrives.
And metal history changes again.
“Raining Blood” is only a little over four minutes long, but its structure, atmosphere and sheer physical impact helped turn it into one of the defining songs of extreme metal. It has remained a fixture of Slayer’s live repertoire and one of the most recognisable pieces of music ever produced by the thrash movement.
The importance of Reign in Blood, however, goes far beyond Slayer and thrash.
This is where the story becomes particularly interesting.

During the second half of the 1980s, musicians in the underground began taking the aggression of thrash even further. Faster tempos, deeper and harsher vocals, darker imagery and increasingly extreme guitar work began to produce what would become death metal.
Bands such as Possessed, Death, Morbid Angel, Obituary and others developed their own identities, but Slayer’s influence was impossible to ignore. Reign in Blood demonstrated that metal could become faster, harsher and more brutal without losing its musical identity.
It effectively helped provide a bridge between thrash and death metal.
Calling Slayer the sole “inventors” of death metal would be historically inaccurate. The genre had multiple roots and pioneers. But calling Reign in Blood one of its foundational records is entirely justified. AllMusic’s Steve Huey has gone as far as describing the album as an influence on the entire death-metal genre, while musicians from Death, Obituary, Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corpse have all been associated with its enormous legacy.
The influence did not stop there.
Slayer’s sound travelled into black metal, grindcore, groove metal, metalcore and countless other branches of extreme music. Bands ranging from Sepultura and Kreator to Pantera, Machine Head, Slipknot, Lamb of God, Gojira and Behemoth have cited Slayer as an influence. Dave Lombardo’s drumming, in particular, became a reference point for musicians who wanted to push metal percussion into increasingly extreme territory.

There is also something important about Reign in Blood that has little to do with technical innovation.
It has an attitude.
The record does not sound like a band attempting to impress anyone. There is no desire to make the music comfortable, accessible or respectable. It sounds like four musicians discovering just how far they could push their own language.
That was part of the power of thrash itself.

The genre was born in an era when heavy metal was becoming increasingly successful and increasingly commercial. Thrash took the volume, theatricality and musicianship of traditional metal and collided it with the speed and hostility of punk. The result was music that could be technically sophisticated while still sounding dangerous.
Slayer simply took that philosophy further than almost anyone else.
Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman’s guitars were the central weapons, Tom Araya provided the unmistakable voice and bass, and Dave Lombardo supplied the engine. Lombardo’s drumming on Reign in Blood became particularly influential, helping establish a style of extreme-metal percussion in which speed was not simply an effect but an essential part of the composition.
And there is another reason the album remains so powerful: it is incredibly concise.
There is no filler.
The ten tracks occupy less than 29 minutes, meaning the record can be experienced almost like a single sustained attack. By the time “Raining Blood” finishes and the rain disappears, there is a strange sense that something much longer has happened.
That compression is part of the genius.
Reign in Blood did not need 60 minutes to make its point.
It needed 28:58.
Four decades later, thrash metal has travelled an extraordinary distance from the underground clubs of early-1980s California and New York. Metallica became one of the biggest bands in the world. Megadeth, Anthrax and Slayer became institutions in their own right. Hundreds of bands subsequently built careers around the sound and attitude pioneered by the genre’s first generation.
Thrash itself evolved, fractured and merged with other styles.

Some bands became more technical. Others became more melodic. Some moved towards death metal, others towards black metal, groove metal or crossover. New generations rediscovered the original sound, producing waves of revivalist thrash in the 2000s and beyond.
And the influence is still audible today.
You can hear pieces of Slayer’s DNA in extreme metal bands that have little superficial resemblance to the four-piece that recorded Reign in Blood. Sometimes it is the guitar attack. Sometimes the drumming. Sometimes the refusal to slow down. Sometimes it is simply the idea that heavy music does not have to apologise for being heavy.
That may ultimately be the album’s greatest achievement.
Reign in Blood did not merely help define thrash metal.
It helped demonstrate that there was no obvious limit to how extreme heavy music could become.
On October 7, 1986, Slayer released an album that lasted less than half an hour.
Forty years later, its echoes are still everywhere.
The rain is still falling.