It was arguably the band’s best effort since ‘Seasons in the Abyss’
On this day 25 years ago, Slayer released ‘God Hates Us All.’
The album arrived as one of the most aggressive and confrontational records of the band’s career, while also becoming forever associated with one of the darkest days in American history. Following 1998’s Diabolus in Musica, which had incorporated elements of the down-tuned metal dominating the late 1990s, Slayer sought a more direct and vicious approach for its follow-up. For the first time, the band recorded outside the Los Angeles area, working primarily at The Warehouse Studio in Vancouver with producer Matt Hyde. Guitarist Kerry King assumed an especially prominent songwriting role, writing most of the lyrics and roughly half of the music, while Jeff Hanneman remained a crucial musical contributor alongside vocalist/bassist Tom Araya and drummer Paul Bostaph.
Rather than concentrating on the supernatural and Satanic imagery traditionally associated with Slayer, King wrote about more immediate subjects—religion, hypocrisy, anger, violence, alienation and humanity’s capacity for destruction. Songs such as “Disciple,” “New Faith,” “War Zone,” “Payback” and “Bloodline” combined the band’s classic thrash attack with the heavier, lower-tuned guitar sound they had explored during the 1990s. Bostaph recorded his drum parts early in the sessions, while Araya delivered an unusually screamed and abrasive vocal performance. The album was originally targeted for a July 2001 release, but additional remixing—including work involving Rick Rubin and Sean Beavan—helped push it back to September.
Upon release, God Hates Us All was widely viewed as Slayer reclaiming much of the ferocity that had defined landmark records such as Reign in Blood, South of Heaven and Seasons in the Abyss. Critics responded strongly: the album holds a Metacritic score of 80 based on 12 reviews, with 11 classified as positive, while Rolling Stone described it as the band’s most brutal record since Reign in Blood. Longtime fans similarly embraced its uncompromising approach after the more experimental tendencies of Diabolus in Musica, with “Disciple” in particular emerging as one of Slayer’s defining latter-day songs and eventually earning the group its first Grammy Award nomination for Best Metal Performance.
Commercially, God Hates Us All debuted at No. 28 on the Billboard 200, selling approximately 51,000 copies during its opening week, and also reached No. 9 in Canada. By 2009, reported U.S. sales had climbed to approximately 319,000 copies. Its success was significant for a band nearly two decades into its career, particularly at a time when mainstream heavy music was dominated by nu-metal. The record also marked the end of an era: it was Slayer’s final studio album with Bostaph during his original tenure, as an elbow injury contributed to his departure during the touring cycle and opened the door for original drummer Dave Lombardo to return.
Yet the legacy of God Hates Us All can never be separated from its extraordinarily unfortunate release date. The album reached stores on Tuesday, September 11, 2001—the same morning that terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, destroying the World Trade Center towers in New York, striking the Pentagon and crashing another aircraft in Pennsylvania. Slayer obviously had no connection to the attacks, and the release date had been established beforehand after earlier delays, but the coincidence of an album titled God Hates Us All appearing on such a catastrophic day gave its title and lyrics an eerie resonance that no one involved could have anticipated. Lines throughout “Disciple” concerning terrorism, war, chaos and hysteria suddenly sounded disturbingly contemporary, while the attacks also disrupted Slayer’s touring plans as international air travel ground to a halt and several bands withdrew from the planned European Tattoo The Planet tour.
Over the ensuing 25 years, however, God Hates Us All has endured for reasons far beyond the circumstances of its release. It is increasingly regarded as one of Slayer’s strongest post-Seasons in the Abyss albums—a furious early-21st-century reaffirmation of the band’s identity that helped bridge its classic thrash era with its later resurgence on Christ Illusion and World Painted Blood. The coincidence of September 11 remains an unavoidable part of its history, but musically, God Hates Us All stands as the moment Slayer entered the new millennium sounding rejuvenated, confrontational and as uncompromising as ever.
