Earlier this month, longtime Slayer guitarist Kerry King revealed he was p*ssed when the band called it quits in 2019. The guitar legend from the most extreme band of metal’s “Big Four” said there was still plenty left in the tank when they retired.
“Anger… what else?” he told Metal Hammer of how he felt when the idea of retirement came up.
“It was premature. The reason I say ‘premature’ is because my heroes from my childhood are still playing! I can still play, I still want to play, but that livelihood got taken away from me. But, anyway, on to the next chapter, I guess, We were on top of the world, and there’s nothing wrong with going out on top of the world, it’s a good way to go out. So, bravo for that. But do I miss playing? Yeah, absolutely.”
King also told uDiscover (as reported by Metal Hammer) of another point in his career when he was particularly angry, and it came when nu metal was at the height of its popularity in the late ’90s. King hated the genre so much he nearly quit music altogether.
“I was really jaded for a while back in the late ’90s,” he explained. “I couldn’t understand why Limp Bizkit was big. It affected me – I didn’t want to play music. I thought, ‘If this is the way that music’s going, then f*ck this, I hate it’. That’s why Jeff Hanneman wrote so much of our 1998 album Diabolus In Musica, which is too funky for me.”
“Diabolus In Musica” is widely regarded as Slayer’s most polarizing record as the band shifted away from their thrash roots to a more commercial sound of the era.
“I thought it was, was very frat boy stuff, and maybe that’s why it was popular, I don’t know,” he said. “So ‘Diabolus’ didn’t get as much attention from me because, you know, we didn’t stay in focus. Looking back we were just saying, “alright, how do we make Slayer fit into today’s society?” But, that’s probably my least favourite record of our history. That’s our ‘Turbo.’”
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