Slayer Best Songs Ranked — The Definitive Guide

Raining Blood closes Reign in Blood and is the most perfectly constructed Slayer song — the track whose opening sequence (the thunderstorm fading in, the descending guitar figure, the abrupt arrival of the central riff) is one of the most immediately recognisable in metal. Every element earns its place: the intro creates anticipation rather than simply occupying time; the central riff delivers on that anticipation with proportional force; and the song's escalation toward the final section arrives with the inevitability of a storm breaking.

Jeff Hanneman wrote it. The falling tremolo figure after the opening thunderstorm — the specific atonal descending line that announces the riff — is one of the great compositional decisions in extreme metal, and the way the full riff arrives after it is the most satisfying single moment of construction in the Slayer catalogue. It is the last track on the most important extreme metal album ever made, and it earns that position.

Angel of Death opens Reign in Blood without preamble — the first note of Jeff Hanneman's tremolo guitar at full speed, no introduction, no build, no concession — and the effect is still startling on first encounter nearly forty years later. The song is the most historically significant Slayer recording and one of the most important in the history of extreme metal: the track that established the fully realised Slayer sound and that prompted Columbia Records to refuse to distribute the album on which it appeared.

At six minutes — the longest track on a twenty-nine-minute album — it is also the most structurally developed piece on Reign in Blood, moving through multiple tempo changes and riff variations with a coherence that the surrounding shorter tracks cannot achieve within their runtimes. Tom Araya's vocal here is at its most extreme and most committed.

Seasons in the Abyss is the most melodically accomplished Slayer song and the track that demonstrates most clearly the range of what the band could do when the maximum aggression of Reign in Blood gave way to something more patient and more compositionally developed. The song's tempo is mid-paced by Slayer's standards, the riff has a groove that the faster material deliberately sacrifices for velocity, and the chorus — Tom Araya's vocal in its most melodic register — is the most immediately singable moment in the classic Slayer catalogue.

Jeff Hanneman wrote it, and the compositional intelligence on display — the way the verse builds toward the chorus, the way the guitar solo section develops from rather than interrupts the surrounding material — is his finest work. The song also produced one of the most celebrated heavy metal music videos of the era, filmed in Egypt amid the Great Pyramid of Giza.

South of Heaven is the most surprising Slayer song — a mid-paced, almost doomy track that opens the album of the same name and immediately announced the deliberate deceleration from Reign in Blood's maximum velocity. The riff descends slowly, the tempo is measured, and Araya's vocal has a menace that is more effective for being less frantic than the surrounding catalogue. The song demonstrates that Slayer's impact was not purely a function of speed and that the specific weight of their riffing could operate at any tempo.

Jeff Hanneman wrote it. The opening is one of the finest in the Slayer catalogue — the descending riff arriving from silence with a force that its slowness amplifies rather than diminishes — and the song's refusal to escalate to full speed throughout creates a sustained tension that most Slayer tracks resolve within the first thirty seconds.

War Ensemble opens Seasons in the Abyss and is the finest example of the album's balance between the full-speed aggression of Reign in Blood and the melodic development of South of Heaven. The riff is among the finest Kerry King has written — fast without sacrificing the groove that makes the surrounding album's mid-tempo tracks so effective — and Araya's vocal delivery has the barking precision that suits the lyric's content (war as industrial process, combat as mechanical brutality) with specific effectiveness.

The song also has Lombardo's drumming at its most physically commanding on the album — the way he drives the main riff and the way the fills punctuate the verse are the finest demonstrations of his contribution to the early-1990s Slayer recordings.

Dead Skin Mask is the most atmospheric and most genuinely disturbing track in the Slayer catalogue — a song about serial killer Ed Gein (who made masks and furniture from the skin and bones of his victims) that achieves its horror effect not through speed and aggression but through an almost patient, measured approach. The opening riff descends at mid-tempo, the production creates a specific quality of enclosed, claustrophobic darkness, and the interspersed samples of a child's voice create an unease that the surrounding heavy material does not replicate.

It is the most cinematically conceived Slayer track and the one that most clearly demonstrates Jeff Hanneman's ability to create horror through atmosphere rather than purely through volume. The song is not gratuitous — it is genuinely unsettling in the way that the best horror literature is, by making you feel the specific quality of wrongness rather than simply presenting violence.

Mandatory Suicide is the heaviest and most immediately impactful track on South of Heaven after the title song — the piece that most directly bridges the decelerated approach of the album with the full-speed aggression of the surrounding catalogue. The riff is mid-tempo and heavy, the vocal delivery is Araya at his most authoritative on the album, and the song's structure — verse, chorus, the escalating guitar section — demonstrates the compositional clarity that Jeff Hanneman brought to even relatively straightforward Slayer arrangements.

The song is about military suicide missions — soldiers sent on operations from which return is not intended — and the lyric addresses the specific psychology of that condition with a directness that the more abstract war imagery of surrounding tracks does not always achieve.

Postmortem precedes "Raining Blood" on Reign in Blood — the final track before the album's concluding statement — and is the most structurally coherent mid-album track on the record. Where many of the surrounding tracks are pure velocity with minimal structural variety, "Postmortem" has distinct verse and chorus sections, a guitar solo that develops melodically rather than purely atonally, and a final acceleration that transitions directly into the opening thunderstorm of "Raining Blood" — making the two tracks function as a single extended piece on the album.

The connection between "Postmortem" and "Raining Blood" is one of the great sequencing decisions in metal albums — the way the former's final acceleration flows without pause into the latter's opening is a compositional gesture that rewards close listening.

Disciple is the finest track on the post-nu-metal comeback God Hates Us All and the best argument that the late-career Slayer still had something essential to contribute. The song won a Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance — the only Grammy in the Slayer catalogue — and it deserved it: the main riff is the most direct and most physically immediate on the album, Araya's vocal delivery is his most aggressive since the early-1990s material, and the song's structure returns to the direct approach of the classic era without feeling like a nostalgic exercise.

Released on 11 September 2001 as part of an album with that title, Disciple was received with the added context of that date — though the album had been recorded months earlier, the coincidence gave its anti-religious fury an unintended contemporary resonance that remains part of its reception history.

Hell Awaits closes this ranking as the finest track from the pre-Reign in Blood era and the most important piece of evidence for the quality of the album that preceded the masterwork. The title track is the most compositionally developed piece on its album — a nearly seven-minute piece that moves through multiple distinct sections in a way that anticipates the structural ambitions of the subsequent era without yet having the production quality that Rick Rubin would bring to Reign in Blood.

The song opens with a reversed vocal ("Join us") that was one of the first examples of backwards masking in metal done with deliberate theatrical intent rather than accidental coincidence. The central riff is among the finest of the early Slayer catalogue, and the song's extended runtime demonstrates the compositional ambition that would fully materialise on the following album.