Reign in Blood

D.X. Ferris

I’ve seen fire, and I’ve seen Reign in Blood. Fire’s another story. Read on, and you’ll learn about Slayer’s Reign in Blood, the best heavy metal album, by the best metal band.1 Reign is twenty-nine minutes of pure hell, made with some of the biggest names in the music business. Bear with me for a moment, and you’ll hear from the people who made Reign a true phenomenon—those who wrote it, who recorded it, and who still take notes on the album, more than twenty years after it was released. Slayer has been better longer than any other band. The group came to my attention a little early, a little late, in 1985, when the term “heavy metal” was forcibly entering the pop-culture lexicon. After Quiet Riot and Mötley Crüe put metal on my radar, the syndicated radio show Metalshop scorched me with “Fight Fire with Fire”—the first song from Metallica’s second album, their major-label debut. Now I was hooked on the hard stuff: thrash metal.