Hell Awaits (40th Anniversary Edition)

Hell Awaits (40th Anniversary Edition) returns to the album Metal Blade Records first released in April 1985 as Slayer's second, and the label issued this edition on 15 May 2026 as a three-CD earbook. The first disc holds the seven album songs, mastered and restored in February 2025 by Patrick W. Engel of Temple Of Disharmony from the 1985 production tapes. The second and third carry Live from Bochum 1985, eighteen live recordings that had never been issued in any format, physical or digital, and a sixty-page book and a poster complete the set. Where most of the songs on the 1983 debut Show No Mercy stayed under four minutes, three of these seven run past six. Kerry King traces that to how taken he and Jeff Hanneman were with Mercyful Fate's Melissa while the writing was going on, which is why there are fewer songs and longer ones; he calls this "the record where SLAYER became SLAYER". It is sold in Japan as an import.