TOM ARAYA Says 'There Hasn't Really Been Any Talk' Of Another SLAYER Album Yet

Tom Araya has told Billboard.com that there are no plans yet for SLAYER to begin work on the follow-up to last year's "Repentless" album. That effort marked the band's first release since the death of SLAYER's co-founding guitarist Jeff Hanneman.

"We haven't been a put-a-record-out-year-after-year band since back in the '80s, when 'Reign In Blood', 'South Of Heaven' and 'Seasons In The Abyss' came out," Araya explained. "We like to work our material out and make sure we're happy before anybody decides to say, 'Let's do a record.' And now there's no Jeff, so that leaves a lot on Kerry [King, guitar], and he'll need to take a break from touring work to start working on ideas and get stuff together and work things out. So there hasn't really been any talk of a new record yet. The Nuclear Blast [SLAYER's label] people have, but we haven't."

King seemed optimistic about the prospect of a relatively quick follow-up to "Repentless" during an interview with Jägermeister at last month's Bloodstock Open Air festival. He said: "We've got lots of leftover material from the last album, 'cause we wrote so much stuff, and we recorded a bunch of it too. If the lyrics don't change the song musically, those songs are done. So we are way ahead of the ballgame without even doing anything for the next record. And I've been working on stuff on my downtime. Like, I'll warm up and a riff will come to mind and I'll record it. I've gotten a handful of those on this run. So wheels are still turning. I haven't worked on anything lyrically yet except for what was done on the last record, so that's something I've gotta get on. But, yeah, 'Repentless' isn't quite a year old yet."

He continued: "There was a while I didn't consider… I thought maybe this record ['Repentless'] would be like Ozzy's first record, with 'Blizzard Of Ozz' and 'Diary Of A Madman', where they did both at once and put one out and then sat on the other one for a couple of years and put the next one out. But we didn't quite get that far, but there's plenty of stuff."

King added: "Me and Jeff would usually write 'till we got around the ballpark of a record, and there might be two or three left over, but this time there's, like, eight left over. Plus a lot of ideas, like half-songs. Like, the first half a song will go with another half a song. So we might be inching up on ten songs already, when I get down and think about it, and that's very unique for SLAYER, and very cool, because can do a one-two punch on this record.

"We could probably start doing something at the end of next year, but, man, we've still got a lot of touring going on next year. So I'm guessing… What's this… '16, '17… I'm guessing it won't be '18 before we record anything."

SLAYER's seven-week North American tour with ANTHRAX and DEATH ANGEL kicked off on September 9 in Cleveland.

"Repentless" debuted at No. 4 on The Billboard 200, having shifted 50,000 equivalent album units in the week ending September 17, 2015.