Slayer's Reign in Blood turns 40 on October 20, 2026. The band just announced four full-album anniversary shows. Forty years later, every producer and musician working in extreme music is still borrowing from what Rick Rubin did at Hit City West Studios in Los Angeles over three months in early 1986.
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Reign in Blood is the third studio album by American thrash metal band Slayer, released October 20, 1986 on Def Jam Recordings. Produced by Rick Rubin and engineered by Andy Wallace at Hit City West Studios in Los Angeles, the album contains 10 songs in 28 minutes and 58 seconds. Reign in Blood is widely credited as the blueprint for death metal, black metal, grindcore, and most extreme metal subgenres that followed.
It shouldn't have worked. A 22-year-old producer whose previous credit was LL Cool J. A hip-hop label distributing a thrash record. Ten songs in under 29 minutes, which was unheard of. An opening track about Josef Mengele got the album dropped by its distributor. Slayer, until that point, was widely considered the ugly stepchildren of the Big Four: too fast, too ugly, and too evil to break out of the underground.
And yet on October 20, 1986, Slayer released the record that re-established the ceiling for heavy music. Every extreme metal subgenre that emerged afterwards: death metal, black metal, grindcore, deathgrind, brutal death, blackened thrash, war metal, owes something to what Slayer did.
Slayer just announced two full-album 40th anniversary shows on top of their Rocklahoma and Sick New World Texas appearances, billed as “Reign in Blood in full.” It's their first LA-area show in seven years.
So it feels like a good moment to pull this record apart in terms of its production, its cultural impact, and its legacy, and ask what still holds up four decades later.
In my opinion, pretty much everything.
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How did Rick Rubin produce Reign in Blood?
Here's a story Rick Rubin has told a few different ways, but it always lands in the same place. When he signed Slayer to Def Jam after drummer Dave Lombardo reached out, he didn't really know what he was doing. He'd grown up a rock fan, he loved the band, but he had zero metal production experience. Zero. His previous album that year? Licensed to Ill.
And that, according to Rubin himself, is exactly why it worked.
In a 2024 interview with Rick Beato, Rubin laid out his theory for the record. His thesis is rarely based on anything resembling technical engineering, and this album was no different. There was no attempt to copy what Flemming Rasmussen did on Master of Puppets. Rubin was just a fan with an outsider's ear:
“When I hear very fast music like Metallica, and the sounds are big sounds… the whole thing gets blurry, and you can't really hear it. If the music you're playing is fast and if the sounds are big, there's not enough space for those big sounds to happen next to each other.”
Read that again. Because that's the entire philosophy of the record in two sentences. Small sounds move faster through space than big sounds. If you want the riffs to land at 220 BPM, you can't make them sound like granite. You have to make them sound like a scalpel.
The subtractive production approach explained
Rubin's word for what he did on this record was subtractive. Not additive. He wasn't trying to pile tricks on top of Slayer; he was trying to strip things away until only the essentials were left.
The most famous example: no reverb on the guitars or vocals. None. In 1986, when every metal record had guitars drenched in plate and spring, when vocals were floating in cathedral-sized ambience, Rubin left it dry as a bone. The reason was mathematical more than aesthetic: reverb is decay tails, and decay tails stack on top of each other at high tempos until the mix turns to mud. Strip the reverb, and suddenly the band can play faster without the music dissolving.
For context on how radical this was: go back and listen to Hell Awaits, Slayer's album from just one year earlier. It's drenched. Everything is soaked in reverb. Listen to Master of Puppets, released six months before Reign in Blood. The snare has a plate on it you could land a plane on. That was the sound of metal in 1986.
Rubin stripped all of it. And the result, per Metal Hammer, was an album that sounded “dry as a bone and heavy as granite.”
The producer's chair, literally
Here's a detail that tells you everything about Rubin's method. During the Reign in Blood sessions, he placed a sofa in the live room at Hit City West. He'd sit on it, close his eyes, and just listen to the band run through songs over and over again. Occasionally, he'd offer a note. Mostly, he'd just listen.
When Tom Araya asked if 28 minutes and 58 seconds was actually enough for a full album, Rubin's response was basically zen: 10 songs, verses, choruses, and leads. That's what constitutes an album.
When they were done tracking and he realized the entire record fit on one side of a cassette, he didn't panic. Kerry King reportedly said it was “neat.” You could listen to it, flip it over, and play it again.
The group's genius on Reign in Blood wasn't knowing what to add. It was knowing what not to add. If you're working on an extreme record and your instinct is to reach for another plugin, another layer of saturation, another reverb, another parallel compressor, ask yourself what happens if you take something away instead. That's the whole lesson.
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What gear was used on Reign in Blood?
Slayer recorded Reign in Blood at Hit City West Studios in Los Angeles from January through March 1986. The engineer was Andy Wallace, who went on to mix Nirvana's Nevermind, Reign in Blood's little cousin in terms of shifting the ground beneath popular music. Wallace is the guy who actually put the scalpel on the track, per most accounts. Rubin produced philosophically. Wallace engineered surgically.
Here's what the band was actually playing through. This is the part that gets argued about on forums to this day, so I'm going to be precise:
Jeff Hanneman's gear (rhythm and lead guitar)
Guitar: B.C. Rich Bich
Pickups: DiMarzio Super Distortion
Bridge: Kahler Pro
Amp head: Marshall JCM800 2203 (unmodified, stock)
Cabinet: Marshall 4x12
Kerry King's gear (rhythm and lead guitar)
Guitar: B.C. Rich Mockingbird
Pickups: DiMarzio Super Distortion
Amp head: Marshall JCM800 2203 (unmodified, stock)
Cabinet: Marshall 4x12
No Mesa Boogies. No pedals in the chain doing heavy lifting. Two unmodified Marshall heads into 4x12s, recorded mostly live with the band in the same room. That's it. That's the tone that invented an entire category of music. No overthinking.
If you're trying to replicate this style of no-nonsense metal guitar tone with modern tools, our guide on achieving huge guitar tone with amp sims walks through how to get this character in the box.
Tom Araya's bass rig
Bass: B.C. Rich bass
Role in mix: Functional low-end support. Locks with Lombardo's kick. Stays out of the guitars' way.
Dave Lombardo's drum kit: the 22″ ride that became a signature cymbal
Dave Lombardo's drumming on this album is so foundational that Paiste eventually made a signature cymbal based on his actual 22″ ride from the sessions. It's called the “Reign Ride.” He still has the original cymbal. He was playing a Tama kit with Paiste Rude cymbals, a setup his dad bought him at Guitar Center in 1979 for $1,100, and which he was still using.
Drum kit: Tama (original 1979 setup)
Cymbals: Paiste Rude series, including the 22″ ride that inspired the Paiste “Reign Ride” signature cymbal
Lombardo's double-kick work on this record is the blueprint. Not because it's the fastest double-bass ever recorded (it wasn't even the fastest in 1986) but because it's the cleanest. Every note is audible and placed carefully. The infamous double-kick break in “Angel of Death” is, to this day, the standard audition piece for metal drummers. He starts his bass drum patterns with his left foot, which is unusual and part of why the feel is slightly off-kilter from other players of that era.
Why Rick Rubin pushed the drums louder in the mix
Rubin made a specific choice with the drums that modern metal producers either imitate or react against. He pushed the drums louder in the mix than the conventional wisdom allowed. His reasoning, per Rolling Stone:
“The nature of distorted electric guitars is that they sound loud regardless of how loud they are. Whereas drums, because it's a natural instrument, depending on how loud they are in the mix really changes that feeling of how hard they're being hit.”
Translation: distorted guitars are compressed by nature. They sound loud at any volume. Drums aren't. So if you want the drums to feel violent, you have to make them audibly loud. This is why every note Lombardo plays feels like an event. It's a mix balance decision.
Producer takeaway: if your metal mix sounds limp despite the guitars being huge, check your drum level. There's a very good chance your guitars are eating them alive, not in EQ, but in perceived loudness. Push the drums until they feel uncomfortable, then pull back one dB. That's the Rick Rubin move.
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Why was Reign in Blood banned before release?
Columbia Records, the distributor for Def Jam, refused to release Reign in Blood in April 1986 due to the opening track “Angel of Death,” which details Josef Mengele's medical experiments at Auschwitz. The album was ultimately released by Geffen Records on October 20, 1986, though Geffen omitted its logo and left the album off its official release schedule.
Let's talk about the elephant in the room. “Angel of Death” is the reason this album has the reputation it does. Not just because it's a perfect opener (which it is: that scream, that chromatic descending riff, those downstroke chugs), but because it nearly sank the entire record.
Jeff Hanneman wrote the lyrics after picking up two books about Josef Mengele on tour. Hanneman's father had served in WWII and brought home medals picked up from dead German soldiers, and Hanneman, for better or worse, developed a fascination with the Third Reich that he described as historical rather than ideological. The song details Mengele's medical experiments at Auschwitz in graphic, clinical, dispassionate language. Hanneman always insisted it was “a history lesson,” not an endorsement.
The music industry was not interested in this distinction.
Columbia Records, who distributed Def Jam, refused to release the album. The album had been scheduled for April 1986. It didn't come out until October. Label president Walter Yetnikoff reportedly said, “My shareholders are all Jewish!” and demanded the song be removed.
Rubin refused. Slayer refused. The album sat on the shelf while everyone involved scrambled to find a distributor who would touch it. Geffen Records eventually took it, but Geffen was so nervous about the fallout that they didn't put their logo on the album and didn't include it on any official release schedule. The record essentially sneaked into stores.
The controversy has followed Slayer for four decades. In Germany particularly (and understandably) the song has been met with hostility, protests, and refusal to play it on radio or in clubs. The band has consistently denied Nazi sympathies, pointing out that their frontman is Chilean, their drummer is Cuban, and their producer is Jewish. Kerry King's line on this, roughly: “People get an idea in their heads and you'll never talk them out of it.”
It's worth being honest here: this is genuinely contested territory. There are serious critics, including Holocaust scholars, who argue that Hanneman's “neutrality” in the lyrics amounts to its own form of harm, that describing Mengele's atrocities in clinical, unjudgmental language reduces the victims to objects. Those critics aren't wrong to raise the question. And there are fans and critics who hear the song as exactly what Hanneman said it was, reportage of evil, with the evil self-evident.
Forty years on, you get to decide which reading you land closest to. What's not up for debate is that the controversy was the making of the band. It turned Slayer from a thrash band with an underground buzz into the most notorious metal act in America. CBS's refusal to distribute didn't kill the album; it mythologized it.
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How did Reign in Blood influence death metal, black metal, and grindcore?
Reign in Blood is credited as the foundational influence on death metal, black metal, and grindcore. Bands including Death, Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel, Deicide, Sepultura, and Napalm Death have cited the album as essential to their development. Reign in Blood bridged the gap between heavy metal's long-form song structures and the short, fast, brutal compositions that defined extreme metal from 1987 onward.
Three things, really. And each one became the foundation of a different subgenre.
1. It blurred the distinction between thrash and hardcore punk
Slayer had always been faster than Metallica or Megadeth, but the first two Slayer records were recognizably heavy metal. Long songs. NWOBHM-influenced twin leads. Hell Awaits had a seven-minute title track with a prog structure. Reign in Blood threw all of that out the window.
The songs are short. “Necrophobic” is 1:40. “Reborn” is 2:10. “Jesus Saves” is 2:54. These are hardcore punk song lengths married to metal vocabulary. The influence was bands like Discharge, D.R.I., Cro-Mags, hardcore acts where speed and brevity were virtues. Slayer fused that sensibility with metal's harmonic language and created something that hadn't existed: thrash that was structured like hardcore.
This is why death metal, grindcore, and powerviolence all cite this record. Without Reign in Blood, there's no bridge between metal's long-form song structures and the 90-second blasts that defined everything that came next.
2. It pioneered the “clean brutality” production aesthetic
We already covered this, no reverb, drums pushed, subtractive philosophy, but it bears saying again in legacy terms. Every producer working in extreme metal today is either imitating or reacting against the Reign in Blood sound.
When Colin Richardson made the classic death metal records (Carcass, Fear Factory), he was extending the Rubin template. When Scott Burns built the Morrisound Florida death metal sound with Morbid Angel and Obituary, he was extending the Rubin template. When Kurt Ballou set up GodCity and recorded Converge, he was reacting against the Rubin template, bringing raw saturation and room back into extreme music.
Either way, every single one of those producers is in conversation with what happened at Hit City West in 1986.
3. It proved that extreme metal could be musical
Here's the thing that separates Reign in Blood from the countless bands who tried to out-fast or out-brutal Slayer afterwards. Every song on this record has hooks. “Angel of Death” has that iconic half-time riff, so iconic that Public Enemy sampled it on “She Watch Channel Zero?!” two years later. “Raining Blood” has one of the most recognizable intro sequences in all of metal. “Altar of Sacrifice,” “Criminally Insane,” “Postmortem,” every track has a riff you can hum.
That's why the record outlasted its imitators. Extreme music that's just extreme is forgettable. Extreme music that's extreme and catchy is permanent.
Which bands cite Reign in Blood as a foundational influence?
Pull on any thread of extreme metal and eventually you hit Reign in Blood. Some have said flatly that the album inspired the entire death metal genre. Chuck Schuldiner of Death, Paul Mazurkiewicz of Cannibal Corpse, Mike Smith of Suffocation, Steve Asheim of Deicide, all of them have cited Lombardo's playing and this record specifically as foundational. Andreas Kisser of Sepultura said simply: “Without Slayer, Sepultura would never be possible.”
The Norwegian second-wave black metal scene came out of the same conversation. The extremity of the vocals, the velocity of the drumming, the willingness to make music that was ugly on purpose, that ethos runs through Deathcrush, through A Blaze in the Northern Sky, through Pure Holocaust. Different production aesthetic entirely, but the same permission slip.
Grindcore? Napalm Death's Scum, released in 1987, is basically Reign in Blood taken to its logical conclusion: even shorter songs, even faster tempos, even less pretense. Every extreme micro-genre that emerged over the following decade was essentially asking, “what happens if we push what Slayer did one more click in this direction?”
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Reign in Blood 40th anniversary: Slayer's 2026 full-album shows
Slayer will perform Reign in Blood in full at four shows in 2026 to celebrate the album's 40th anniversary:
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September 4, 2026: Mystic Lake Amphitheater, Shakopee, Minnesota (with Down and Suicidal Tendencies)
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September 6, 2026: Rocklahoma Festival, Pryor, Oklahoma
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October 24, 2026: Sick New World Texas, Fort Worth (with System of a Down and Deftones)
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November 13, 2026: Kia Forum, Inglewood, California (with Cannibal Corpse and Cavalera performing Sepultura's Chaos A.D.)
Reign in Blood was certified gold in 1992, 500,000 copies. A modest number by rock-record standards, but a staggering number for an album this extreme. It peaked at #94 on the Billboard 200, which was Slayer's first chart appearance ever. Kerrang! called it “the heaviest album of all time.” Rolling Stone put it at #6 on their 2017 list of the 100 Greatest Metal Albums.
More importantly, it's still in conversation. Every time a new generation of metal kids gets handed a guitar, somebody hands them this record within 18 months. It's a rite of passage. Every extreme metal producer has a Reign in Blood moment, the first time they heard it and realized what was possible.
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What producers can learn from Reign in Blood today
Let me close with my takeaway, the main thing I wanted to write about.
If you take one thing from Reign in Blood's 40th anniversary, let it be this: the record is a monument to restraint, not excess.
Every tool Rubin had available in 1986, the outboard verbs, the tape machines, the SSL console processing, the vintage compressors, he deliberately did not use most of them. He made choices about what to leave out. He kept the guitars dry. He kept the signal path simple. He pushed the drums louder than you'd expect. He let the band play fast by refusing to let the production get in their way.
We live in an era where every bedroom producer has more plugins than Hit City West had rackspace. And the temptation, the constant, gnawing temptation, is to reach for more. More saturation. More parallel compression. More reverb on the sends. More stereo imaging. More more more.
Rubin's lesson in 1986 was that sometimes the most radical thing you can do is take something out. Leave the snare dry. Don't double-track the vocal. Don't put an ambient reverb on the lead guitar. Let the kick hit without a sample behind it. Trust the performance.
If you want to see this restraint philosophy applied to a modern metal production from start to finish, our video walkthrough of mixing a metal song from start to finish puts these principles into practice in a real session.
That's why this record still sounds like it was made yesterday. And that's why producers will still be borrowing from it when it turns 50.
Play it loud this year. Catch one of the four shows if you can. And the next time you're working on a metal record and your hand hovers over an effect send, ask yourself what would happen if you just didn't.
That's the whole lesson.
Reign in Blood turns 40 on October 20, 2026.
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Frequently Asked Questions about Reign in Blood
When was Reign in Blood released?
Reign in Blood was released on October 20, 1986 by Def Jam Recordings, with distribution handled by Geffen Records after Columbia Records refused to release the album.
Who produced Reign in Blood?
Rick Rubin produced Reign in Blood. It was his first production credit for a metal band. Andy Wallace engineered the album.
Where was Reign in Blood recorded?
Reign in Blood was recorded at Hit City West Studios in Los Angeles, California, between January and March 1986.
How long is Reign in Blood?
Reign in Blood contains 10 songs with a total runtime of 28 minutes and 58 seconds, making it shorter than most full-length studio albums.
Why was Reign in Blood controversial?
The album's opening track “Angel of Death,” written by Jeff Hanneman, depicts Nazi physician Josef Mengele's medical experiments at Auschwitz. Columbia Records refused to distribute the album as a result. Geffen Records eventually released it without using its logo on the packaging.
What amps did Slayer use on Reign in Blood?
Both Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King used unmodified Marshall JCM800 2203 heads and Marshall 4x12 cabinets. They played B.C. Rich guitars (Bich and Mockingbird models) loaded with DiMarzio Super Distortion pickups.
What drum kit did Dave Lombardo use on Reign in Blood?
Dave Lombardo played a Tama kit with Paiste Rude cymbals. His 22″ ride cymbal from the sessions later inspired the Paiste “Reign Ride” signature model.
What is the Rick Rubin “subtractive production” approach?
Rubin's subtractive approach means removing elements from a mix rather than adding them. On Reign in Blood, this meant no reverb on guitars or vocals, a simplified signal chain, and drums pushed louder in the mix than conventional 1986 metal production allowed.
How did Reign in Blood influence death metal?
Reign in Blood introduced hardcore-punk song lengths (often under three minutes) to metal's harmonic vocabulary, pioneered a dry, clear production aesthetic that allowed fast playing to remain audible, and proved that extreme music could still contain memorable hooks. These three innovations became foundational for death metal, black metal, and grindcore.
Will Slayer play Reign in Blood in full at the 40th anniversary shows?
Yes. Slayer will perform Reign in Blood in full at all four 2026 anniversary shows: Mystic Lake Amphitheater (September 4), Rocklahoma (September 6), Sick New World Texas (October 24), and the Kia Forum in Los Angeles (November 13).