Kerry King riffs about his return to the stage after Slayer and the band’s unexpected Riot Fest reunion
As the final moments approached, Kerry King faced the end of Slayer’s supposed last performance with an epic heavy metal gesture. During the band’s closing minutes the night of Nov. 30, 2019, the guitarist stood onstage at the Forum in Inglewood and removed the heavy chains he’d worn for years as a weighty symbol of his metal fervor. He then dropped them loudly to the floor.
Slayer, the pioneering thrash metal band he co-founded in 1981 from suburban Huntington Park, was finished as an active touring and recording outfit, much to the sadness and disbelief of the teary, moshing crowd in front of him. But King already had a plan for his future, with a solo career and a new band he’d never intended but would tackle with full force.
King had most of the roster for his new project figured out, starting with Slayer drummer Paul Bostaph, and several songs already written. He was ready to go.
“I was in a good spot,” King says now, on the phone from a tour during a recent travel day off in Madison, Wis. “It was different for me because starting over and getting everybody together, it’s just an entirely different thing. But I had lots of ideas and had lots of [song] titles, and I never got to panic mode.”
On Wednesday, King will be back at the Kia Forum for the first time since that last night with Slayer, now at the head of a new metal outfit under his own name, appearing as a support act to co-headliners Lamb of God and Mastodon. This follows the release in May of his debut album, “From Hell I Rise,” a 13-song collection of speedy, raging guitars that sounds remarkably like Slayer — unsurprising, since King was the hands-on architect for the band’s last several studio recordings.
The first public evidence of King’s new solo career was the February release of his single “Idle Hands,” with a galloping riff and a raging vocalist (Mark Osegueda), which reassured any fans worried that the guitarist might wander from the aggressive chaotic sound he’d spent the last four decades helping to create.
“It checked all the boxes: It’s got a great riff in it, it’s got a great vocal break, it’s speedy like people expected me to be,” says King, now 60. His solo career had begun.
Then, before the month was over, fans were shocked when Slayer announced three festival reunion dates this fall: Chicago’s Riot Fest on Sept. 22, Louder Than Life in Louisville, Ky., five days later and Sacramento’s Aftershock on Oct. 10.
The guitarist notes that the predictable offers to reunite came in as soon as the group’s final show was over, but King and founding singer-bassist Tom Araya turned down everything for nearly five years. Araya was the band member most anxious to retire from the road, and King didn’t expect that to change.
“I wasn’t ready to hang it up, but there’s really no point in going on with someone that doesn’t want to do it anymore, because then you’ve got a half-hearted person onstage,” says King, who ultimately accepted, then embraced the notion of retiring while Slayer was in top form. “We won the Super Bowl and we left. That’s pretty cool. Now we’ve got these three anniversary shows. Will there be more? I don’t know. Will we ever record again? Definitely not. Will we ever tour again? Definitely not. But a show here and there to make some people happy, I’m not against that.”
For King, his work wasn’t over even if Slayer no longer existed as it had. One sign was how close the sound of his first solo project echoes his old band. And Bostaph was happy to rejoin him there.
“One thing I’ve learned through all these years is to do what you do best,” Bostaph, 60, says in a separate phone interview from Moose Jaw, Canada. “Kerry writes a certain way, and I like to play drums a certain way. When I play with him, this is how I play. There’s definitely going to be a familiarity there.”
King’s preparations included securing four members of the Slayer road crew. Originally, he also wanted Slayer guitarist Gary Holt (who had replaced the late Jeff Hanneman), but the inevitable comparisons to King’s former band weighed on him. He instead recruited Phil Demmel (formerly Machine Head), on second guitar.
“The more pieces of Slayer I have, the more people are going to tear it apart and call it ‘Slayer 2.0, Slayer this, Slayer that,’ whatever,” King says. “So I decided to get somebody other than Gary. I don’t have any problems with Gary. Obviously, we’ve got three Slayer shows coming up, but it’s just the right choice, because then it makes the two bands too similar.”
In Demmel, who filled in for Holt on four Slayer shows during its final European run in 2018, he had a musician whose melodic playing offered a contrast with King’s wildest guitar spasms. Although King has long been a fan of solo players like Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads, he’s always craved the dual guitar attack of his favorite band, Judas Priest.
“I really am a fan of harmonizing guitar parts, harmonizing guitar riffs, like the main riff of [Slayer’s] ‘Raining Blood’ has numerous guitar harmonies, and you can’t do that with one guitar player,” says King. “Holt and Demmel are very similar. They’re a lot more melodic than I am, so it creates a nice balance of anarchy and melodic music.”
Another early recruit was bassist Kyle Sanders, formerly of Hellyeah and older brother to Mastodon singer-bassist Troy Sanders. Singer Osegueda (formerly of Death Angel) was the last to join up in February 2023, after King heard friends describe him as having “a quiet reputation of being the best singer in thrash,” he recalls. “His vocal sound has teeth. It sounds like the vocals are just gonna jump out of the speaker.”
The pandemic delayed King’s initial plan to begin recording in 2020. During that time, he left Southern California and spent a year living in Las Vegas. King and his wife, Ayesha, then moved to New York and settled into a Tribeca condo in 2021. For the metal guitarist, that meant a change in lifestyle, which included giving up owning his own car and his expansive snake collection.
Recognizable for a shaved scalp tattoed with demonic images and with the words “God hates us all” tattooed in block letters along his left arm, King now gets around the city by subway.
King’s intention was to find a new band name to perform under. A couple of potentials he liked — Blood Reign and King’s Rain — linking the new band to Slayer’s best-known album, 1986’s “Reign in Blood,” were already in circulation. It would take some legal work to secure either name.
“Let me tell you, it is difficult to come up with a band name because I tried for months and months and months,” King says. “Every time we landed on one, it might make its way to the trademark attorney, who would say, ‘No, it’s kind of a headache. You don’t want to go there.’”
With a series of festival dates coming up that had to be announced, he finally went with his own name under protest. For the next album, King says, he remains open to finding a band name along the lines of Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow.
“I think it would be cool for the fans to be able to chant something other than my name,” he says with a laugh.
Ideas for songs and riffs usually began as rough recordings on King’s cellphone. He wrote and recorded demos of new songs for a year and resurrected two recorded originally by Slayer for its final album but never released — the title song and “Rage.” The new band recorded the album at Henson Studios in Hollywood with producer Josh Wilbur.
The increased influence of punk rock can be heard on “Everything I Hate About You” and “Two Fists,” with echoes from two 1980 bands from Fullerton, , the Adolescents and D.I. Among the lyrics is the line, “I think the ship’s about to sink/I think I need another drink,” words King says he can’t imagine putting in a Slayer track.
Slayer, like other thrash originators in the 1980s, had a sound partly fueled by its collision of metal and punk. In Slayer, Hanneman was the first to embrace the punk sound.
“It took me a while to get it. Jeff was into it before any of us were,” says King, who at the time couldn’t understand the appeal of blunt punk vocals in comparison to heavy metal heroes like Rob Halford and Ronnie James Dio. “How can you like this when there’s these singers out there that sing like birds? It took me a while to understand the angst and the rage and the very remedial guitar parts in most punk music. But once I got it, it’s definitely part of where I came from and what I am today.”
After this leg of his first solo tour ends, King and Bostaph will turn their attention to the three Slayer festival dates. King’s band includes a few Slayer songs in its live set, but even Bostaph was surprised when the reunion dates were lined up.
“I’m like, ‘You’re kidding, right?’ I really put that to bed,” the drummer says. “When something like that ends, I’m not going to do that to myself: Gee, someday it’d be great to get back together again. Life is life and this is how it is, and I’m moving on to whatever the next thing is. I put that to bed and then all of a sudden the call comes.”
Beyond Slayer, King says he looks to the examples of an earlier generation of metal players for guidance regarding his future. At age 72, singer Rob Halford continues to lead Judas Priest onward, while Black Sabbath retired in 2017 with its founding band members in their late 60s. King is already planning for his band’s next two albums, with several songs already written.
“I’m certainly not getting any younger, but as long as it’s viable live and it doesn’t look like a bunch of old guys trying to play thrash music, it has life,” King says. “I’ve got to work my way up, earn my dues in this band and show people how great it is to see live. I want to retire in this band. I want this to be everybody’s last gig.”
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