God Hates Us All

God Hates Us All is a work on which SLAYER compressed and thrust out their cutting riffs and high-tension rhythm even further. The songs cut away waste, and Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman’s guitars fire off sharp fragments in rapid succession. After the previous album’s experiment, the band returned powerfully to bare aggression. It is also a fateful record, released, as it happened, on September 11, 2001. On “Disciple,” “God Send Death,” “Bloodline” and “Here Comes the Pain,” while foregrounding anger, the band’s playing is extremely controlled. Songs like “Darkness of Christ” and “Payback” breathe bare hatred too. Not only speed but the design of where to stop and where to push supports this work’s ferocity. With a rawer, more aggressive sound, it is a record that strongly showed SLAYER was alive and well.