The Slayer guitarist on his old band, his new band, his new solo album, humanity’s failure, and the pressure of going solo.
Kerry King wasted no time in getting back on the horse after his band, thrash metal juggernauts Slayer, called it a day in 2019. “I had a few months off, and that was enough for me,” says the guitarist. “I’ve had a long career, and
I’m a lot closer to the tail end of it, so any time wasted is lost time.”
The fruit of his recent labours is his vicious debut solo album From Hell I Rise, a record that won’t disappoint Slayer fans. That band’s unexpected reunion is off-limits today – a publicist sits in on our conversation to make sure – but King still has plenty to say about religion, politics and his late bandmate Jeff Hanneman.
Was there any grand plan behind the solo album, or is this just what comes out every time you pick up a guitar?
Every time you go in with an agenda, nine times out of ten you’re not going to achieve it. For me it’s just sitting down with a guitar and a phone to record it on.
It’s instantly recognisable as an album by the guitarist from Slayer. Was it tempting to step out of that comfort zone and make, say, a prog-metal record or pull a Load/Reload-style left turn?
No. I’m a fan of metal, and luckily I get to write my own. And it just so happens that I’m good at this. If there was ever a point in time to try that, this would have been it, but I don’t have that desire.
Did you get people you hadn’t heard from in years saying: “Hey, I hear there’s a vacancy in your band…”
Surprisingly, very few. I think people figured I had a master plan from day one. Which I kind of did, but it wasn’t chipped in stone. And I thought there’d be offers to fill in [with other bands], but that phone never rang, so I worked on my stuff.
You could have had your pick of pretty much any modern metal singer. Why did you go with Death Angel’s Mark Osegueda.
We’ve been friends for decades, but we got tighter in the last five or six years. He was the only one we tried out. I didn’t want Death Angel Mark, I wanted to build him up in a way that no one’s ever heard him. Everybody I picked was good friends. Paul [Bostaph, drummer] was in Slayer, Phil [Demmell, guitarist] had left Machine Head, Hellyeah [bassist Kyle Sanders’s former band] had broken up. Everybody needed work, so it was out of necessity.
Were you ever tempted to sing? What’s your singing voice like?
I have conviction, but I don’t have great pipes. If it had have worked out to where I had to be the singer, I could have done it. But I can’t sing and play either, so that would have been a big problem. I did do scratch [rough] vocals [on the demos], so if Mark had said: “Why don’t we both sing this part,” I might have said: “Yeah, let’s do it.” I
