In a nearly empty theater on Hollywood Boulevard, Kerry King is making an ominous sound. Showtime is still hours away for the thrash-metal guitarist, who is warming up for his band’s afternoon sound check with a V-shaped guitar in his hands, his head shaved and tattooed, casually playing a bleak riff from the song “Diablo.”
At the moment, he’s playing alone, with no drums, bass, or vocals, and definitely no flashing lights or other stage effects. But none of that is missed as King chops at his guitar strings, building an aggressive noise immediately recognizable from his four decades playing with the thrash originators Slayer and now as a new solo artist.
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“If you told teenage King that I’d still be onstage at 40, I’d laugh at you,” says King, who turned 60 last June, soon after the release of his debut solo album, From Hell I Rise. That same month, King played some of his first shows with a new band under his own name, with a brief run of European festivals. Now he’s preparing to face a full house in Hollywood, the second-to-last night on King’s first solo headline tour, and he’s already plotting another album for release early next year.
“This time I’m super-focused. I’m not a kid and I can’t have five-year gaps between records,” King says. “We talk about it all the time. As soon as cycle one is over, get into the studio—take your tour momentum, take your tour chops, and go in and bust out the next one.”
As King is one of the key creators of thrash, it’s no surprise then that his solo music is very much in the Slayer vein, with songs speedy and threatening, lyrics grim with intimations of evil, screeds on war, politics, and religion. Starting with his first single, “Idle Hands,” King made it clear that he was continuing that tradition with his new band of veteran metal players: drummer Paul Bostaph (Slayer), guitarist Phil Demmel (Machine Head), bassist Kyle Sanders (Hellyeah) and singer Mark Osegueda (Death Angel).
The enraged title song on From Hell I Rise was originally recorded by Slayer but never released. There were also slower, if no less menacing tracks like “Tension” and “Trophies of the Tyrant.” Then there’s “Two Fists,” showing the ongoing SoCal punk rock influences he first picked up from his late Slayer bandmate, guitarist Jeff Hanneman. Back when Slayer began on the Los Angeles club scene in 1981, King didn’t understand punk at all.
“I wasn’t into it because I was into what I would call virtuoso singers—Rob Halford or Ronnie James Dio or Freddie Mercury—people with range and super-attack and super-harmonies vocally,” King remembers. “When he brought punk in, I was like, ‘Why do you like this? These guitar players are playing like three chords poorly. And the singer was just screaming over it.’”
King eventually learned to genuinely love Orange County punk bands like the Adolescents and D.I. “Being force-fed for so long, I was like, ‘I get it,’” he admits now. “Even though Jeff brought punk to Slayer, as we grew as songwriters, I became more the faster, punkier writer and Jeff became more of the moodier writer. It was cool because we wrote different styles, so it made for better albums.”
This year, after some South American solo dates in May, one show that looms large for King is Slayer’s upcoming gig in support of Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath’s final performance on July 5 in Birmingham, England. Slayer will be joined by an all-star lineup of hard rock icons, including Metallica, Tool, and Guns N’ Roses. King says that even if Slayer hadn’t already reunited for two festival shows in 2024, he would have advocated for reconvening just to play Ozzy’s farewell metal summit.
“I probably would have done that if that was the only show that I did. That’s an important day,” says King, who notes that he and Bostaph have already been rehearsing the Sabbath tune Slayer will perform. “I think that’s going to be a huge moment for the fans, but it’s going to be a huge moment for me. It’s a huge moment in rock history.”
It will be the third reunion performance of Slayer, who officially ended their career as a fulltime touring band to a tearful crowd in 2019. (Later this year is the rescheduled Louder Than Life festival in Kentucky.) The first of their unexpected reunion shows was at Riot Fest in Chicago last September. King’s expectations for that concert and the band’s 20-song set were unremarkable.
“It was like another show for me until I got there,” he says now. “When I got onstage, I got goosebumps because they reacted to everything as if we were Rammstein. It was amazing.
Every aspect, from the intro to the songs. It was way bigger than I thought it was going to be.”
Asked if Slayer could now be expected to play occasional one-off shows into the open-ended future, King says, “That’s fair.”
“I guarantee you we’re never gonna tour because that’s what we said we wouldn’t do,” King adds. “We’re never gonna record again, because I have another outlet to do that and it’s new. As I told the guys [in King’s band] during this run, it’s new for me. It’s teenage King getting to go out and experience things with new people in new ways. Even though I’ve done it for 40 years, now I’m with different dudes, different music. Aside from some of the small dressing rooms, it’s starting over and fun.”
Back in 2004, on that year’s traveling Ozzfest festival, Slayer was part of a bill that included Sabbath and Judas Priest, newly reunited with singer Rob Halford. It was a unique lineup of three essential forces in metal (even aside from the presence of the younger Slipknot and Lamb of God on the second stage).
“That was my peak—for me as a fan—reunited Black Sabbath, reunited Judas Priest, and us,” King recalls. “A bill couldn’t be any better to me.”
Both were major influences on Slayer, and Judas Priest was and remains King’s favorite band ever. On that tour, King was so uncharacteristically shy around Halford, he couldn’t personally get himself to ask the singer to sign his stack of old Priest records that he began collecting as a teenager and brought on the tour. While Slayer was onstage one night, King’s wife, Ayesha, went to Halford with the records to sign.
“Why didn’t he just ask me!” a puzzled Halford asked, but King says now, “I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
He’s also been on the other side of that scenario, meeting nervous fans and up-and-coming musicians. “I signed some stuff for some dude yesterday and he was shaking—‘Calm down, man. I’m not going to bite you,’” he says with a laugh. “I used to be them and I try to make the experience as pleasant as it can be.”
With musicians backstage, he keeps an open-door policy for his dressing room, typically stocked with the vodka and tequila required on his tour rider. “Since I’ve been there, I’m super easy on them: ‘Come have a drink. Door’s open,’” he says. “Everyone on most tours I’ve done know that. My room is where people hang out.”
At the Fonda Theatre in L.A., King and his new band are deep into their 90-minute set. The ancient venue, where a century before the Hollywood actors Clark Gable and John Barrymore had appeared live on its stage, is now packed with well over 1,000 fans. A swirling circle pit erupts on the dance floor, including a dude in full circus clown makeup, as “Two Fists” swings hard with a vicious, strutting beat.
Later, singer Osegueda growls a command: “Los Angeles, let me see your fucking hands!” And immediately a forest of arms shoots up with horns raised high.
Then comes “Shrapnel,” the longest song on King’s album, as the stage is smothered in deep red-and-orange light, and the mosh pit slowly spins to its Sabbath-like intro, before erupting to the crazed leads from guitarists King and Demmel. The gruesome Slayer thrash-metal classic “Raining Blood” follows, powered forward by Bostaph’s frantic drum beats.
At times, a spotlight hits King in the back and he’s in silhouette and seemingly the only one onstage, looking essentially unchanged as he did from the time Slayer released God Hates Us All on the morning of 9/11. As he gets older, he only sees more runway ahead of him, once again taking some inspiration from the example of Halford, a full dozen years older and still busy touring and recording as always.
“What we do on stage is physical in itself,” says King, who now lives in Manhattan and works out in a gym between tour dates. He also walks all over the city. He’s an experienced drinker, but says he’s never done drugs. “I told my wife a while back, ‘If I ever did blow, you know I would have to be the best at it.’”
For King to have become a champion inhaler of powder would not have led to 40 years of Slayer and the energy to start over with a new band of metal commandos. He’s got too many plans for that.
“I don’t need anything clouding my vision moving forward.”
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