In honor of Slayer Day — which, in our opinion, is every single day — we’ve taken a deep dive through the thrash OG’s catalog and picked out five of the band’s sickest, most twisted lyrics. Expect plenty of Nazis, serial killers and raining blood.
“Angel of Death”
Pumped with fluid, inside your brain
Pressure in your skull begins pushing
Through your eyes
Burning flesh, drips away
Test of heat burns your skin,
Your mind starts to boil
Slayer’s masterpiece Reign in Blood opens with a bang, screeching out of the gates with Jeff Hanneman’s no-compromise description of the real-life horror of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele, who tortured men, women and children at the Auschwitz concentration camp during WWII.
“Necrophiliac”
I feel the urge the growing need
To fuck this sinful corpse
My tasks complete the bitch’s soul
Lies raped in demonic lust
All you really need to know about this Reign in Blood cut is how Tom Araya has intro’d the song live in concert. “This is a song about older women,” he says in the clip above. “The kind you find six feet underground. You know, the best part about older women is when you eat them out. You can hear the maggots in your teeth. Yummy.”
“Dead Skin Mask”
Graze the skin with my finger tips
The brush of dead warm flesh pacifies the means
Incised members ornaments on my being
Adulating the skin before me
Infamous Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein inspired Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Silence of the Lambs and The House of 1000 Corpses with his horrific acts, which included making masks from the skin of his flayed victims. He also inspired Araya’s lyrics in this beyond-creepy tune.
“213”
Primitive instinct a passion for flesh
Primal feeding on the multitudes of death
Sadistic acts a love so true
Absorbingly masticating a part of you
Araya also indulged his fascination with serial killers on this Divine Intervention cut, based on the cannibalistic crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer.
“Psychopathy Red”
Perversion, slow death agonizing
Stab around the eyes
Flow of blood, warm taste brings me pleasure
Eclipsing all reason
Pushing sperm, in her imitation
Painful act in vain
Organs cooked, bled out potency
Now I am now complete
Soviet mass murderer Andrei Chikatilo, who famously described himself as “a mistake of nature, a mad beast,” murdered and mutilated no less than 52 women and children throughout the Eighties, making him an ideal subject for a Slayer song — namely, this one, penned by Hanneman four years before the guitarist’s death.
