As the final moments approached, Kerry King met the end of Slayer’s supposedly final performance with an epic heavy metal gesture. During the band’s final minutes on the night of November 30, 2019, the guitarist stood on the stage of the Forum in Inglewood and removed the heavy chains he had worn for years as a symbol of his metal fervor. He then dropped them loudly to the floor.
Slayer, the pioneering thrash metal band he co-founded in 1981 in suburban Huntington Park, was done as an active touring and recording act, much to the sadness and disbelief of the moshing, crying 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 planned but would tackle with all his might.
King already had most of the roster for his new project, starting with Slayer drummer Paul Bostaph, and several songs already written. He was ready to go.
“I was in a good place,” King says now, on the phone from a tour during a recent day off in Madison, Wisconsin. “It was different for me because starting over and getting everyone together is a completely different thing. But I had a lot of ideas and a lot of [song] titles, and I never went into panic mode.”
On Wednesday, King will return to the Kia Forum for the first time since that final night with Slayer, now fronting a new metal outfit under his own name, appearing as the opening act for co-headliners Lamb of God and Mastodon. This follows the May release of his debut album, “From Hell I Rise,” a 13-song collection of fast-and-furious guitar work that sounds remarkably like Slayer — no surprise, as King was the hands-on architect of the band’s last studio recordings.
The first public evidence of King's new solo career was the February release of his single “Idle Hands,” featuring a galloping riff and furious vocalist (Mark Osegueda), which reassured fans worried that the guitarist might be moving away from the chaotic, aggressive sound he had spent the past four decades helping to create.
“It ticked all the boxes: It’s got a great riff, a great vocal break, it’s fast like people expected it to be,” says King, now 60. His solo career had begun.
Then, before the month was out, fans were shocked when Slayer announced three reunion festival dates this fall: Chicago's Riot Fest on Sept. 22, Louder Than Life in Louisville, Kentucky, five days later, and Sacramento's Aftershock on Oct. 10.
The guitarist notes that predictable offers to reunite came as soon as the group's last show ended, but King and founding singer/bassist Tom Araya turned it all down for nearly five years. Araya was the band member most eager to retire from touring, and King didn't expect that to change.
The Kerry King Band, from left to right: Kyle Sanders, Mark Osegueda, Kerry King, Phil Demmell and Paul Bostaph.
(Jim Louvau)
“I wasn’t ready to quit, but there’s really no point in sticking with someone who doesn’t want to do it anymore, because then you have an unenthusiastic person on stage,” says King, who eventually agreed and then embraced the idea of retiring while Slayer was in peak form. “We won the Super Bowl and we left. That’s great. Now we have 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 was not done, even if Slayer no longer existed as before. One sign of that was how closely the sound of his first solo project resembles that of his former band. And Bostaph was happy to join him there again.
“One thing I’ve learned over the years is to do what I do best,” Bostaph, 60, says in a 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, that’s how I play. There will definitely be a familiarity there.”
King's preparations included recruiting four members for Slayer's touring crew. Originally, he also wanted Slayer guitarist Gary Holt (who had replaced the late Jeff Hanneman), but the inevitable comparisons to King's old band weighed on him. Instead, he recruited Phil Demmel (ex-Machine Head), as second guitarist.
“The more Slayer pieces I have, the more people are going to rip them apart and call them ‘Slayer 2.0, Slayer this, Slayer that,’ whatever,” King says. “So I decided to hire someone other than Gary. I have no problem with Gary. Obviously, we have three Slayer shows ahead of us, but it’s the right choice, because then the two bands look too similar.”
In Demmel, who replaced Holt for four Slayer shows during their final European tour in 2018, he had a musician whose melodic playing offered a contrast to King’s wilder guitar spasms. Though King has long been a fan of solo musicians like Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads, he has always longed for the dual-guitar attack of his favorite band, Judas Priest.
“I'm really a fan of harmonizing guitar parts, harmonizing guitar riffs, like the main riff of [Slayer’s] “Raining Blood” has a lot of guitar harmonies, and you can’t do that with just one guitarist,” King says. “Holt and Demmel are very similar. They’re much more melodic than I am, so it creates a nice balance between anarchy and melodic music.”
Another early recruit was bassist Kyle Sanders, formerly of Hellyeah and the older brother of Mastodon singer/bassist Troy Sanders. Singer Osegueda (formerly of Death Angel) was the latest to join in February 2023, after King heard friends describe him as someone who had “a quiet reputation for being the best singer in thrash,” he recalls. “His vocal sound has teeth. It sounds like the vocals are going to 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 lifestyle change, including giving up his own car and his extensive snake collection.
Recognizable by his shaved scalp tattooed with demonic imagery and 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 name for the band. There were already a couple of names he liked floating around: Blood Reign and King's Rain, which linked the new band to Slayer's best-known album, 1986's Reign in Blood. It would take some legal work to get either name right.
“Let me tell you, it’s hard to come up with a name for the band because I tried for months and months and months,” King says. “Every time we came up with one, it might end up in the hands of the trademark attorney, who would say, ‘No, that’s a pain in the ass. You don’t want to get into that.’”
With a string of festival dates still to be announced, he eventually settled on his own name under protest. For the next album, King says he remains open to pursuing a band name similar to Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow.
“I think it would be great if fans could chant something other than my name,” she says with a laugh.
Ideas for songs and riffs usually began as rough recordings on King's cell phone. He wrote and recorded demos of new songs for a year and resurrected two originally recorded by Slayer for their final album but never released: the title track and “Rage.” The new band recorded the album at Henson Studios in Hollywood with producer Josh Wilbur.
The growing influence of punk rock can be heard on “Everything I Hate About You” and “Two Fists,” with echoes of Fullerton’s two 1980s bands, 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 on a Slayer track.
Slayer, like other thrash metallers of the 1980s, had a sound fueled in part by the combination of metal and punk. In Slayer, Hanneman was the first to embrace the punk sound.
King Kerry
(Andrew Stuart)
“It took me a while to understand it. Jeff was interested in this before any of us,” says King, who at the time couldn’t understand the appeal of thumping punk vocals compared to heavy metal heroes like Rob Halford and Ronnie James Dio. “How can you like this when you have singers who sing like birds? It took me a while to understand the angst, rage and very corrective guitar parts in most punk music. But once I understood it, it’s definitely part of where I came from and who I am today.”
After this leg of their first solo tour is over, King and Bostaph will turn their attention to three Slayer festival dates. King's band includes a few Slayer songs in their live set, but even Bostaph was surprised when the reunion dates were scheduled.
“I thought, ‘You’re kidding, right? ’ I really put that behind me,” the drummer says. “When something like that ends, I’m not going to do that to myself: God, it would be great to get back together someday. Life is life and that’s how it is, and I’m going to move on with whatever comes next. I put that behind me and all of a sudden they call me.”
Beyond Slayer, King says he looks to an older generation of metal musicians for guidance on his future. At 72, singer Rob Halford still fronts Judas Priest, while Black Sabbath called it quits in 2017 with its founding band members leaving in their late 60s. King is already planning his band’s next two albums, with several songs already written.
“I’m not getting any younger, but as long as it’s viable to play live and not sound like a bunch of old guys trying to play thrash music, it’s got life,” King says. “I have to work my way up, earn my place in this band and show people how cool it is to see it live. I want to retire in this band. I want this to be the last show ever.”
