SLAYER Hell Awaits Album CD (1985)

Before Reign in Blood made Slayer a household name in households with very understanding parents, there was Hell Awaits, and Hell Awaits is the one the purists never stopped talking about.

Released in 1985 on Metal Blade, this is Slayer at their most genuinely occult-obsessed and compositionally unhinged, songs that sprawl and mutate rather than simply bludgeon. The title track opens with a backwards incantation and then just keeps escalating for nine minutes. It influenced every black metal band that came after it without most of them ever admitting it. If Reign in Blood is the precision instrument, Hell Awaits is the thing that came before anyone knew what they were building. The 2021 re-release on CD is the right way to own it, next to your Exodus and Sepultura records on the shelf where they belong.

Format: CD. Full length studio album. Re-released 2021. Country of origin: USA. Genre: thrash metal.

Fans of: Anthrax, Testament, Overkill, Kreator, Sepultura, Exodus.