Last we checked in with Slayer, we learned that frontman Tom Araya and guitarist Kerry King are in the studio working on new music.
With the passing of guitarist Jeff Hanneman this past May, many fans were disillusioned thinking it wouldn't be the same. Well, perhaps you don't have to be as worried, as Tom Araya revealed today that some Hanneman-penned tracks could appear on the new album.
Araya previously hinted at some unused Hanneman material in a Guitar World article, but in speaking with Loudwire today revealed there are actually two unused tracks:
“We have two songs,” Araya tells us. “I haven’t had the privilege of going through his audio files at the moment, but that’s something I plan to do. Once we get some business squared away, that’s something I plan to do; to go through his music and see what he has. I know that he had several ideas together that he had presented to us in the course of the past year. Before he passed away, there was one complete song that he had managed to send to everybody that I listened to and that I thought was really, really good and communicated that to him. There’s stuff that I thought would be great to listen to just to see what’s there and how we can possibly use what he had done. That’s something I have every intension of doing.”
Araya goes into more detail, “One song was a song we didn’t finish for ‘World Painted Blood.’ That song is actually complete. Me and Jeff were working on melody and lyric ideas for that song. We weren’t really happy with what we were doing or what was becoming of that song, so it didn’t make it on the album. It was just something we were working on and we couldn’t find anything we were happy with that would work well lyrically and melody-wise, so that’s one reason why that one didn’t make it on the album, but that song is complete, it’s done, it’s ready to go. I don’t want to use the term ‘typical’ [laughs] but it’s Jeff, it’s obvious who put the song together. It’s Jeff music. He created a certain way and he put music together a certain way; it’s signature Jeff. It’s new, it doesn’t sound like anything else that we’ve done, in my opinion. Jeff usually just wrote songs and a lot of his stuff had certain signature things he would do to songs. That stuff is in there, but I would consider it new.”
That makes me far more curious about the new album than previously. Even with Dave Lombardo out of the band, I think drummer Paul Bostaph can hold his own. Also, who's to say Lombardo's contributions won't be heard on the album? Back in February, Kerry King said he completed eight songs with Lombardo for the eventual new album.
We might get some memorable tunes out of Slayer after all. New Slayer… are you excited?
