GARY HOLT Has Brought 'Unity' To SLAYER

SLAYER and EXODUS guitarist Gary Holt was interviewed on a recent installment of HATEBREED frontman Jamey Jasta's official podcast, "The Jasta Show". You can now listen to the chat using the SoundCloud widget below. A couple of excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On SLAYER's new album, "Repentless", to which Holt contributed a number of guitar solos:

"It came out totally killer. And the sound; [producer] Terry Date did just such a good job of making a really thick-, aggressive-sounding record.

"I mean, expectations… I don't know. What did people expect? It's SLAYER. I think the album met all the expectations and then exceeded them, because… I don't know. Did people think it was gonna fall on its ass?

"Kerry [King, guitar] worked his ass off on this record. I mean, I watched it firsthand. I watched the man, on days off, taking a guitar to his room, writing and working on the lyrics in his room, getting home from tours and being back in rehearsal, like, two days later after five weeks on the road. I don't write anything on tour. I'm too lazy. Take a guitar to my room? Fuck that shit! I'm sleeping. But he just worked non-stop. He just had tunnel vision on making this album the best SLAYER album that this band could put out. And it's crushing. It's killer, and I love it. I'm still in that point to where I'm still kind of acclimating to the record myself, 'cause I never listen to my own music after it's done, whether it's EXODUS or SLAYER. The difference here is I don't know how to play everything on this album yet. An EXODUS album, maybe I stopped listening to it, but at least I wrote it all. Now I'm starting to have to delve into the album to learn how to play the stuff."

On his addition to SLAYER:

"People have asked me in the past: 'What do you think is the most important thing you brought to SLAYER?' And I just… I don't know… It sounds like a really hippie-ish way to say it. I'd say it's unity. 'Cause I'm really close to everybody in the band. I think I maybe have been a bridge in keeping everybody smiling.' Cause I'm always in a good mood; I'm a hard guy to piss off. I keep Tom [Araya, bass/vocals] laughing, and Kerry and I… We have our times when I hang out with Kerry at night. I hang out with Tom and Paul [Bostaph, drums] at different times, but everybody's happy, and everybody's enjoying it."

"Repentless" debuted at No. 4 on The Billboard 200, having shifted 50,000 equivalent album units in the week ending September 17.

The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week based on multi-metric consumption, which includes traditional album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA).

In terms of pure album sales, "Repentless" opened with 49,000 copies, marking SLAYER's highest-charting album yet.

"Repentless" was released on September 11 via Nuclear Blast.