Slayer – Hell Awaits: 40th Anniver

Slayer – Hell Awaits (40th Anniversary Version)
Metal Blade
Release Date: 15/05/26
Review by Jon Deaux
8/10 

Without this album, death metal doesn’t exist in its current incarnation. Black metal doesn’t evolve the way it did. The entire downstream of extreme metal shifts direction. This is not hyperbole. This is the physics of water.

There’s something you need to understand. If you require me to inform you that ‘Hell Awaits’ is good, you’ve been in a sensory deprivation tank for four decades, and the first thing you’ve done once you’ve emerged into the light of day is read a metal review. That’s pretty damn disturbing, but I totally respect it. You don’t need Hell Awaits’ forty-year anniversary to appreciate it. It doesn’t need to be remastered, reassessed, or any other re-word the music industry uses to extort money out of people who already own the original. It needs you to sit down, shut up, and listen to Tom Araya’s screams penetrate your central nervous system until something fundamental changes inside you. The forty-year anniversary is just an opportunity to facilitate that.

It was 1985. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, perplexed about stuff. Back to the Future taught an entire generation that the fifties were fun, when in reality, they were not. Heavy metal was doing incredibly well, with Iron Maiden’s Live After Death, Ronnie James Dio’s Sacred Heart, and Celtic Frost having released To Mega Therion and walking around Switzerland looking like they stepped out of the cover of a grimoire someone found in a skip. Into this rather concerning scenario came four young men from Huntington Park, California, wielding a collection of riffs so terrifyingly composed they should have required a customs declaration. Purpose of visit? “To destroy music as you currently understand it and rebuild it from the rubble into something that will scare parents for the next four decades.” Right, on you go then.

That album was Hell Awaits. As you’ll note, it’s left humanity in an irreparable state of confusion ever since.

“It’s the record where Slayer became Slayer.” -Kerry King, stating the fucking obvious,

He’s absolutely right, and the fact that he could sum up what I’ve taken hundreds of words to say in seven simple ones is exactly why he’s Kerry King and I am not. Show No Mercy, their debut from 1983, was a powerful mission statement – a frothing, snarling, uninvited invitation that nobody needed, but everybody desperately did – but Hell Awaits is where that band went away, locked themselves in a room for half a year with Mercyful Fate’s Melissa album playing on loop, and emerged a little feral but equipped with ideas so heavy they shouldn’t legally be allowed to exist.

The influence of King Diamond is all over this record, and it is brilliant. Show No Mercy was good enough to keep its songs short, getting the job done in under four minutes. Hell Awaits, however, is a different animal altogether, with three of the seven tracks extending past the six-minute mark. The title track alone is close to seven minutes long. For a band whose approach to song length can only be described as approaching a cold shower with the determination of a suicide bomber, this is an act of compositional ambition that’s as shocking today as it was back then. But it works, because King and Hanneman didn’t stretch out their songs just for the sake of it. They were building something. Architecture from violence.

“Jeff and I were still trying to figure out who we were as musicians, and we were both infatuated with Mercyful Fate’s Melissa album during the writing process.” -Kerry King, on the Mercyful Fate obsession that unintentionally changed metal forever.

The record kicks off with an audio spell of reversed vocal chanting of ‘join us!’ emerging from what sounds like the formation of the underworld – an example of sonic theatre so masterfully crafted that hearing it from outside a suburban bedroom in 1985 would have had parents calling priests before the first proper riff hit. But then that riff hits, and it becomes clear that no amount of spiritual intervention will be able to change that. ‘Hell Awaits’ the track itself is a six-minute cascade of interlocked, tempo-changing brutality that also doubles down as a genuinely progressive piece of music – with odd meters, sudden key changes, melodic releases leading to walls of noise, and so much more. This isn’t a band making noise. This is a band with a plan, and the plan is your complete psychological dissolution, delivered efficiently and without apology.

‘Kill Again’ is the very definition of velocity put into human form. ‘At Dawn They Sleep’ wraps its vampiric themes in a composition so advanced it’d be impressive on a progressive metal album, let alone a thrash one. ‘Necrophiliac’ – you guessed it, the title is what it is, accept it and move forward, we’re all adults here – takes dissonance to a level of precision bordering on academic. And there’s Jeff Hanneman, weaving melodies through the carnage that somehow feel like they shouldn’t even be there. The man operated on a wavelength entirely different from anyone else in the studio, a kind of controlled chaos that makes the whole affair seem simultaneously like it’s falling apart and inevitable. He is dead, and metal is irrevocably changed because of it, and that is a sad truth.

But then there’s the historical angle. There’s literally nothing to debate. 1985 was such a productive year for extreme metal that it deserves an advisory warning label: the debuts of Megadeth, Exodus, Kreator, Possessed, Destruction, Overkill, and Hirax, all coming out within months of each other like an act of sonic terror. And in that company, ‘Hell Awaits’ is still the most bizarre, structurally ambitious, atmospherically dense, and plain terrifying. Everything that came after it – every death metal band that amplified the aggression, every black metal act that pushed the darkness to new extremes, every thrash metal outfit that attempted to find the outer boundaries of the genre – all of them carry Slayer’s DNA like shrapnel from an explosion nobody saw coming.

And crucially – and I cannot emphasize this enough – Slayer never gave up on it. They never softened their approach, never reinvented themselves, never apologized, never went underground, and definitely never took the call from a producer whose expertise was getting a band’s music onto the radio. While contemporaries of theirs were variously doing all those things in search of fame, Slayer continued on: becoming heavier, faster, darker, and completely indifferent to a mainstream that was desperate to exploit them. It takes an incredible degree of character to repeatedly refuse easy money for four decades. Most people lack it. Most bands don’t.

The bonus tracks on the forty-year anniversary edition, recorded in Bochum, are – to use a technical term – insane. Seventeen tracks from a young band in the very act of becoming something permanent, playing to a German audience that probably had no clue what was going to happen to them and is still digging pieces of their previous worldview out of furniture years later. The recording has that unmistakable sound of the best 1985 live tapes – raw, occasionally chaotic, full of energy that modern production just can’t recreate because modern production, for all its advantages, does exactly that. This is metal archaeology. These are cave paintings, and they’re magnificent.

‘Hell Awaits’ forty years do not need reassessment. They don’t need an analysis or a legacy piece. It knows what it means. It knew in 1985 and nothing that’s happened between then and now has changed that. What the 40th Anniversary Edition provides is simply more. More material, more documentations, more of the single most significant metal record of 1985 packaged in a way that gives you no reason not to own it. If you’ve never heard this album – and I say this without judging you, just concerned – you need the forty-year anniversary. If you have heard it, you’re already heading for the cash register. And if you’re Kerry King, sitting in a room knowing full well that forty years ago you and three of your friends made something that irrevocably changed everything, well. You deserve whatever expression is currently on your face.
TRACKLIST

Hell Awaits (40th Anniversary Edition) – 3-LP Vinyl Box Set

LP 1: 7-track Hell Awaits album

Side A

1. Hell Awaits
2. Kill Again
3. At Dawn They Sleep

Side B

1. Praise of Death
2. Necrophiliac
3. Crypts of Eternity
4. Hardening of the Arteries

LP 2: Live from Bochum 1985

Side A

1. Hell Awaits (Live from Bochum 1985)
2. Aggressive Perfector (Live from Bochum 1985)
3. Captor of Sin (Live from Bochum 1985)
4. The Final Command (Live from Bochum 1985)
5. Kill Again (Live from Bochum 1985)

Side B

1. Crypts of Eternity (Live from Bochum 1985)
2. Fight Till Death (Live from Bochum 1985)
3. Necrophiliac (Live from Bochum 1985)
4. Haunting the Chapel (Live from Bochum 1985)
5. Hardening of the Arteries (Live from Bochum 1985)

LP 3: Live from Bochum 1985

Side C

1. Black Magic (Live from Bochum 1985)
2. Die by the Sword (Live from Bochum 1985)
3. The Antichrist (Live from Bochum 1985)
4. At Dawn They Sleep (Live from Bochum 1985)
5. Show No Mercy (Live from Bochum 1985)

Side D

1. Evil Has No Boundaries (Live from Bochum 1985)
2. Chemical Warfare (Live from Bochum 1985)
3. Praise of Death (Live from Bochum 1985)

Hell Awaits (40th Anniversary Edition) “Blood” Filled Liquid Vinyl

Side A

1. Hell Awaits
2. Kill Again
3. At Dawn They Sleep

Side B

1. Praise of Death
2. Necrophiliac
3. Crypts of Eternity
4. Hardening of the Arteries

Hell Awaits (40th Anniversary Edition): 3-CD Earbook

Disc 1

1. Hell Awaits
2. Kill Again
3. At Dawn They Sleep
4. Praise of Death
5. Necrophiliac
6. Crypts of Eternity
7. Hardening of the Arteries

Disc 2

1. Hell Awaits (Live from Bochum 1985)
2. Aggressive Perfector (Live from Bochum 1985)
3. Captor of Sin (Live from Bochum 1985)
4. The Final Command (Live from Bochum 1985)
5. Kill Again (Live from Bochum 1985)
6. Crypts of Eternity (Live from Bochum 1985)
7. Fight Till Death (Live from Bochum 1985)
8. Necrophiliac (Live from Bochum 1985)
9. Haunting the Chapel (Live from Bochum 1985)
10. Hardening of the Arteries (Live from Bochum 1985)

Disc 3

1. Black Magic (Live from Bochum 1985)
2. Die by the Sword (Live from Bochum 1985)
3. The Antichrist (Live from Bochum 1985)
4. At Dawn They Sleep (Live from Bochum 1985)
5. Show No Mercy (Live from Bochum 1985)
6. Evil Has No Boundaries (Live from Bochum 1985)
7. Chemical Warfare (Live from Bochum 1985)
8. Praise of Death (Live from Bochum 1985)

Hell Awaits (40th Anniversary): Digital

1. Hell Awaits
2. Kill Again
3. At Dawn They Sleep
4. Praise of Death
5. Necrophiliac
6. Crypts of Eternity
7. Hardening of the Arteries
8. Hell Awaits (Live from Bochum 1985)
9. Aggressive Perfector (Live from Bochum 1985)
10. Captor of Sin (Live from Bochum 1985)
11. The Final Command (Live from Bochum 1985)
12. Kill Again (Live from Bochum 1985)
13. Crypts of Eternity (Live from Bochum 1985)
14. Fight Till Death (Live from Bochum 1985)
15. Necrophiliac (Live from Bochum 1985)
16. Haunting the Chapel (Live from Bochum 1985)
17. Hardening of the Arteries (Live from Bochum 1985)
18. Black Magic (Live from Bochum 1985)
19. Die by the Sword (Live from Bochum 1985)
20. The Antichrist (Live from Bochum 1985)
21. At Dawn They Sleep (Live from Bochum 1985)
22. Show No Mercy (Live from Bochum 1985)
23. Evil Has No Boundaries (Live from Bochum 1985)
24. Chemical Warfare (Live from Bochum 1985)
25. Praise of Death (Live from Bochum 1985)

LINKS

https://slayer.bandcamp.com/album/hell-awaits
https://www.facebook.com/slayer

Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Jon Deaux and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.