KERRY KING Isn’t A Fan Of ’90s SLAYER (Mostly)

Slayer kicked off the ’90s with Seasons In The Abyss and it got weird from there. Four years later Slayer released Divine Intervention, their first album with drummer Paul Bostaph, before moving on to the mostly-covers album Undisputed Attitude in 1996. Slayer then capped things off with the almost entirely Jeff Hanneman-composed Diabolus In Musica in 1998, which leaned way harder into the nü-sound at the time.

Despite having a few releases to their name throughout the decade, Kerry King isn’t exactly into most of it. In an interview with Metal Blast, King said he’d warn his younger self about some of Slayer‘s ’90s output if he could go back in time.

“That’s easy, ’cause there’s one part of my career that I always look back at and go, ‘You should have paid more attention then.’ The ’90s. ‘Pay attention to the ’90s and don’t put out the shitty albums you’re probably gonna put out in the ’90s.’

“I don’t like the stuff we did in the ’90s. I was very disenchanted by music because bands that were getting popular I didn’t understand. And I still don’t understand. I never liked Limp Bizkit. I never liked bands of that era. It just bummed me out and turned me off.

“And it’s really visible to me on Diabolus In Musica. I didn’t pay any attention to that album. I had a couple of songs on there, but I didn’t contribute as much as I usually do. And then I came back to my senses and I said, ‘You know what? Fuck that.’ I’m, like, ‘We’re in Slayer. We need to be fucking important. I need to pay attention to this shit.’ And you can tell that I started paying attention when God Hates Us All came out, ’cause that was kind of our rebirth into, like, ‘Yeah, we got a little lost during the ’90s, but we righted the ship and here we go.'”

King later noted that Jeff Hannemann tried to embrace a different sound for Slayer throughout the ’90s, but King wasn’t super into the shift… except for Undisputed Attitude. King is a big fan of that one.

“We weren’t real prolific in the ’90s. Paul left us once. So we did the Undisputed Attitude album, which I am very proud of; I love that covers record. We had a couple original songs, a couple of punk songs from Jeff. ‘Gemini’ from me.

He added: “Yeah, the late ’90s just — it’s not a good point in my history, in my mind.”