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How Slayer Made ‘Hell Awaits’
June 23, 2026
1985 — Slayer’s Hell Awaits pushed the band beyond the raw chaos of Show No Mercy, leaning into longer, darker, and more complex material that helped shape the blueprint for extreme metal’s next wave.
Recorded at Eldorado Recording in Los Angeles, the setup was tight, literally. The live room was small by major-label standards, just big enough to fit Dave Lombardo’s kit and two guitar stations, while bass and vocals were tracked separately. Slayer tracked live whenever possible, only layering solos and lead vocals later, and wrapped the album in a matter of weeks, quick even by mid-’80s standards. Financing was still DIY at its core: Brian Slagel co-funded the sessions with the band.
The lineup was locked in with Tom Araya (bass, vocals), Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman (guitars), and Dave Lombardo (drums), but the production side was less straightforward. Officially credited to Slayer and Brian Slagel, the sessions also included Chrysalis A&R man Ron Fair, brought in for industry weight despite having no metal background, famously reacting, “Wow, these guys are really angry.” The actual recording was handled by engineer Bill Metoyer, with Carolyn Collins assisting, while mastering was done by Bernie Grundman, fresh off launching his own Hollywood facility, an early sign Metal Blade was stepping up its game.
Musically, Hell Awaits stands apart in Slayer’s catalog. Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman were heavily influenced by Mercyful Fate’s Melissa, which led to a more expansive structure, just seven tracks, three of them stretching past six minutes. The result was a darker, more “sludgy and amorphous” sound compared to the surgical attack of Reign in Blood. The title track’s eerie intro even hides a backward message, “join us,” while Araya pushed himself vocally to deliver speed without sacrificing clarity, sharpening a style that would define thrash vocals going forward.
The cover art drew inspiration from a 1977 Heavy Metal comic, with the back sleeve featuring band photos, tracklist details, and early signs of Slayer’s growing international reach. The Black Legion.
1 Hell Awaits
Lyrics By – King
Music By – Hanneman, King
6:16
2 Kill Again
Lyrics By – King
Music By – Hanneman, King
4:56
3 At Dawn They Sleep
Lyrics By – Hanneman, King, Araya
Music By – Hanneman
6:17
4 Praise Of Death
Lyrics By – Hanneman
Music By – King
5:21
5 Necrophiliac
Lyrics By – Hanneman, King
Music By – Hanneman
3:46
6 Crypts Of Eternity
Lyrics By – Hanneman, King, Araya
Music By – Hanneman, King
6:40
7 Hardening Of The Arteries
Lyrics & Music By Hanneman
3:55
Artwork – Albert Cuellar
Bass, Vocals – Tom Araya
Drums – Dave Lombardo
Layout – Brian J Ames
Lead Guitar – Jeff Hanneman, Kerry King
Management – Rick Sales, Sanctuary Artist Management
Mastered By – Bernie Grundman
Mixed By [Engineer] – Bill Metoyer, Ron Fair
Photography By – Harold O.*, Lowell Katz
Producer – Brian Slagel, Slayer
Recorded By [Engineer Assistant] – Carolyn Collins
Recorded By [Engineer] – Bill Metoyer, Ron Fair
Remastered By – Eddy Schreyer
How Slayer Built The Sound Of ‘Hell Awaits’
1985’s Hell Awaits sits in that crucial space between Slayer’s scrappy underground beginnings and the surgical brutality of Reign in Blood
The budget that Brian Slagel helped organize meant the band could finally bring in some heavyweight help on the technical side, which is why you see names like Bernie Grundman on mastering and Eddy Schreyer on remastering in the credits, with Bill Metoyer once again behind the console as engineer after working on Haunting the Chapel and Show No Mercy. One of the most notorious touches from those sessions is the intro to the title track, built around a reversed demonic vocal repeating “join us” and closing with “welcome back,” a perfect snapshot of mid-’80s metal atmosphere. Tom Araya has been pretty blunt in hindsight about the sonics, admitting that by modern standards the production is “so under par,” even if those records still mean a ton to him for what the band achieved at the time. Dave Lombardo, on the other hand, has pointed out that Hell Awaits already felt like a serious step up from Show No Mercy on the drum side, noting he no longer had to overdub cymbals. Lombardo has singled out “At Dawn They Sleep” as his personal favorite cut, specifically because of the way it lurches along slow and grimy before exploding into that double‑bass section at the end. During the vocal tracking for that song, King and Hanneman were not even in the studio; Araya and Slagel handled it, and when Araya spotted a misspelled word in Hanneman’s lyrics, he just sang it phonetically even though it was not an actual word. The closer “Hardening of the Arteries” even loops things back into the larger concept, fading out on a riff section that mirrors the opening of “Hell Awaits,” one of the few times Slayer ever used a fade‑out over a continuous riff. Visually, the album’s cover was put together fast. The art by Albert Cuellar, with its skeletal demon beasts locked in battle, was assembled “overnight” according to Araya, and later turned out to closely mirror a scene from a 1977 story in Heavy Metal magazine called “Approaching Centauri,” drawn by Jean Giraud. That connection did not really surface until 2011, when a blog post uploaded PDFs of the original comic and fans started spotting the similarities.
To promote Hell Awaits, Slayer embarked on the Combat Tour with Venom and Exodus. Decibel magazine later hailed it as “The Greatest Metal Tour of All Time.” Exodus guitarist Gary Holt commented, “We immediately bonded with the Slayer guys. It was two bands of friends playing with one band of heroes, you know? We were just star-struck.”
Tom Araya reflected on the experience of touring during this era: “We did our first tour in the US in a car with a paper with addresses and a map…you had to pull over and get on a public telephone and say ‘hey, we’re gonna be there in about twenty minutes’…The first tour in Europe was the same way.”
