SLAYER opened their 2026 with the record that made them. On Friday, September 4 at Mystic Lake Amphitheater in Shakopee, Minnesota, the band played "Reign In Blood" front to back to mark the album's fortieth anniversary — their first concert in a year. DOWN, SUICIDAL TENDENCIES and HATEBREED supported.
The first half of the night was the career set, thirteen songs deep: "South Of Heaven", "Hate Worldwide", "Disciple", "Mandatory Suicide", "Repentless", "War Ensemble", "When The Stillness Comes", "Jihad", "Seasons In The Abyss", "Born Of Fire", "Dead Skin Mask", "Hell Awaits" and "213". Then the album, in sequence, and that is where the night turned genuinely rare.
Six of the ten "Reign In Blood" tracks had been sitting unplayed for years. "Piece By Piece", "Necrophobic", "Criminally Insane" and "Epidemic" had all been absent from a SLAYER stage since 2014. "Altar Of Sacrifice" had not been aired since 2015, "Jesus Saves" since 2019. For a band whose sets have hardened over the last decade around a familiar twenty-odd songs, running the whole record meant digging out half of it again.
The lineup is the one that last toured in 2019 and has handled every comeback show since 2024: Kerry King and Gary Holt on guitars, Paul Bostaph on drums, Tom Araya on bass and vocals.
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"Reign In Blood" arrived on October 7, 1986 through Def Jam, the band's first record with producer Rick Rubin, and it is twenty-nine minutes long. Kerrang! called it the heaviest album ever made. Its release was held up over the sleeve and over "Angel Of Death", whose subject is Josef Mengele's experiments at Auschwitz.
Jeff Hanneman never had any patience for what followed. "'Angel Of Death' was a big problem. I remember getting a phone call after the album was done: Sony wasn't going to release it," he said. "I didn't think anything was wrong with 'Angel Of Death' or anything else we did, it's a documentary! There's no 'Heil Hitler' or 'white people rule,' it's a documentary; grow up, people."
The album eventually reached No. 94 on the Billboard 200 — SLAYER's first chart entry anywhere — and was certified gold in November 1992.
Dave Lombardo, who played on it, summed it up in 2021: "I look at that album as a masterpiece. And it's one of those albums that will stand the test of time. The fire, the energy that that album has. I don't hear that in other records."
Nine dates remain this year: Rocklahoma on September 6, Mexico City on October 21, Sick New World in Fort Worth on October 24, two nights at the Kia Forum in Inglewood on November 13 and 14, then Bogotá, Santiago, Buenos Aires and São Paulo through December.