Last week, veteran California thrashers SLAYER announced their heaviest release ever — the Metal Eagle Edition of their upcoming album Repentless, set for a September 11 release. Made of aluminum alloy, measuring 15″ x 17″ x 3″ and weighing in at a hefty 7.8 pounds (yes, the final version is heavier than previously announced), the Metal Eagle Edition will house a deluxe digipak of the Repentless CD plus bonus material detailed below. The limited (only 3,000 copies worldwide) and numbered Metal Eagle Edition will be a direct-to-consumer item and available exclusively via the Nuclear Blast mailorder online store.
Now, the time has come to reveal the special contents of this limited collector’s piece.
The Metal Eagle will include the following exclusive items:
* Deluxe digipak (folds out into “inverted cross”)
* Bonus Blu-Ray and DVD including “Slayer Live At Wacken 2014” and “Making Of Repentless Documentary”
* Bonus live CD “Slayer Live At Wacken 2014”
* Fold-out poster
* Album sticker
* Numbered certificate
The highly anticipated Repentless is SLAYER’s eleventh studio album, the first since 2009’s critically acclaimed, Grammy-nominated “World Painted Blood” and the first with producer Terry Date (PANTERA, SLIPKNOT, SOUNDGARDEN). The band — Tom Araya (bass, vocals), Kerry King (guitar), Paul Bostaph (drums), and Gary Holt (guitar), who recorded lead guitar parts for about a half-dozen of the album’s new tracks — started recording “Repentless” in March 2014, and made the track “Implode” available as a free download in April of that year. The band and Date continued to record between September 2014 and mid-January 2015 at Henson Studios in Los Angeles. For the album, “Implode” was completely re-recorded from the ground up, and “When The Stillness Comes”, used as an instrumental track in a Scion commercial, got a revamped intro and all new vocals.
Repentless also includes “Piano Wire”, an unfinished song from the World Painted Blood sessions written by Hanneman. About the track, Rolling Stone wrote that it “begins with an eerie guitar line before evolving into a full-on-doom (and classic SLAYER) riff onslaught.” King put it this way: “When I hear it, I think ‘Jeff.’ It sounds like a Jeff Hanneman song.”
The 12-track “Repentless” is, according to those who have heard it, a sonic assault of brutal, ominous, lightening-fast and heavy-as-hell music with lyrics that unmask what SLAYER knows best — the terror, the corruption and the societal turmoil that dominates our world.
“The new album sounds like SLAYER,” said Araya. “In the past, our fans have always known what to expect, this time they don’t. But we really like it, and I don’t think the fans are going to be disappointed.”
As is expected from SLAYER, the band will support the release of Repentless with extensive touring across the globe, beginning this summer when the band headlines the Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival. That tour kicks off June 26 at Sleep Train Amphitheater in San Diego, California.