With the title and release date just announced for SLAYER’s Repentless, due out September 11 (Nuclear Blast), today the thrash icons announce their heaviest release ever – literally — Repentless, Metal Eagle Edition. Made of aluminum alloy, measuring 15″ x 17″ x 3″ and weighing in at a hefty seven pounds, the Metal Eagle Edition will house a deluxe digipak of the new Repentless CD plus exclusive bonus content to be detailed soon. The limited (only 3000 copies worldwide) and numbered Metal Eagle Edition will be a direct-to-consumer item and available exclusively via the Nuclear Blast mail-order online stores.
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.