Tour dates will be announced soon
The end is near for Slayer. The heavy metal group has announced that they will embark on a final world tour in 2018, after 37 years together. In a video published on social media, the group says, “Slayer to make its exit with one final world tour. Slayer’s final North American tour dates coming…” The 36 second clip includes a career retrospective of posters and images.
The retirement tour seems to have been in the works for awhile. In an interview with Loudwire in 2016, frontman and bassist Tom Araya states that this priorities have changed. “At 35 years, it’s time to collect my pension. [Laughs] This is a career move. I’m grateful that we’ve been around for 35 years. That’s a really long time. So, yeah, to me, it is. Because when we started off, everything was great, because you’re young and invincible. And then there came a time where I became a family man, and I had a tough time flying back and forth. And now, at this stage, at the level we’re at now, I can do that. I can fly home when I want to, on days off, and spend some time with my family, which is something I wasn’t able to do when [my kids] were growing up. Now, they’re both older and mature, so now I take advantage of that. Yeah, it just gets harder and harder to come back out on the road. Thirty-five years is a long time.”
Lamb of God, Anthrax, Testament and Behemoth will provide support on the tour. Dates are expected to be announced later this week.
Slayer’s last album was Repentless, released in September 2015 via Nuclear Blast. The album debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 chart, having shipped 50,000 equivalent album units in its first week. Guitarist Kerry King has spoken about releasing a follow up, their thirteenth studio record, possibly from left over material from the Repentless studio sessions.
“We’ve got lots of leftover material from the last album, ’cause we wrote so much stuff, and we recorded a bunch of it too,” he tells Jägermeister in an interview in 2016. “If the lyrics don’t change the song musically, those songs are done. So we are way ahead of the ballgame without even doing anything for the next record. And I’ve been working on stuff on my downtime. Like, I’ll warm up and a riff will come to mind and I’ll record it. I’ve gotten a handful of those on this run. So wheels are still turning. I haven’t worked on anything lyrically yet except for what was done on the last record, so that’s something I’ve gotta get on. But, yeah, Repentless isn’t quite a year old yet.”
He continues, “We could probably start doing something at the end of next year, but, man, we’ve still got a lot of touring going on next year. So I’m guessing… What’s this… ’16, ’17… I’m guessing it won’t be ’18 before we record anything.”
