SLAYER's New Album May Be Their Fastest Yet

April 20, 2006

SLAYER frontman Tom Araya spoke to MTV.com about the group's follow-up to 2001's "God hates Us All", tentatively due late July. Songtitles set to appear on the CD include "Cult", "Catalyst", "Catatonic" and "Jihad". At this stage, seven weeks into recording, five of the album's 11 tracks are finished and about to be put through the mixing process. SLAYER still need to put the finishing touches on the remaining songs, but Araya expects the band will be finished with everything in the next week or so.

"This album is actually like a culmination of everything we've done," Araya said. "There's one song that I'm thinking will surprise everybody, because of the song itself. I'm not going to say why, because you have to keep that element of surprise, dude. Musically, it's going to blow everybody away. It's going to trip everyone out. It has all the elements of everything we've done. No one's going to be disappointed with this record. It's fast, heavy — maybe faster than anything we've done before. It's going to be brutal. It's what everyone expects from a SLAYER record."

A track called "Eyes of the Insane", Araya said, is perhaps the most political song on the album. The song was inspired by an article he'd read in an issue of Texas Monthly magazine.

"The song's about the effects of war on some of these soldiers," he said. "This article — and it was a pretty trippy article — it really affected me. The entire magazine was devoted to soldiers of this new Iraq conflict that's going on. The effect that the war has had on some of these kids who're coming home and having a tough time dealing with what they've seen — I mean, some of these kids are traumatized and mentally destroyed by what they've seen. The magazine also ran an entire list of the soldiers from Texas who've died. It was several pages with pictures of these kids. It blew my mind."

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