SLAYER's ARAYA Says 'Death Magnetic' Was METALLICA's 'Attempt At Rediscovering Themselves'

MTV's HeadbangersBlog.com recently talked to SLAYER bassist and vocalist Tom Araya about the band's upcoming tour with MARILYN MANSON, the writing process for the group's next studio album and the already recorded new tunes "Psycopathy Red" (which has been released on the Internet) and and "Sleeps With Dolls" (which remains under lock and key). Araya also addressed rumors that SLAYER's gonna hang up the inverted cross after the upcoming record, talked about working again with producer Rick Rubin and engineer Greg Fidelman and offered his opinion on METALLICA's "Death Magnetic".

You can stream the entire 23-minute interview below.

On the subject of METALLICA's "Death Magneitc" album, Araya said, "I think this was [METALLICA's] attempt at rediscovering themselves, but they did it in pieces, just like 'St. Anger' [2003] was in pieces. They had really cool riffs, but they put the wrong riffs together. [Laughs] The songs, they start and… They're long songs. They're all like seven or eight minutes long. To me, eight minutes of riffness — it's just a lot to take in, you know what I mean?! . . . There's some really good riffs in all those songs on the new album. That one song that I had to force myself to listen to completely had some really good riffs in it. And I thought, 'If you get rid of all the other ones that suck and put together the good riffs, you might have a really cool song.' And that's what I hear when I hear eight minutes of music. I hear… It was just too much."

Multi-camera video footage of SLAYER performing the new song "Psychopathy Red" at the B1 Maximum club in Moscow, Russia on November 29, 2008 can be viewed below. Also included is backstage footage from the Moscow concert.