Slayer's future might seem a little uncertain to bassist and vocalist Tom Araya, but to guitarist Kerry King things don't seem quite as muddy. According to King in an interview with Jägermeister (video below), there's plenty of leftover material from Repentless alongside some new riffs King is already working on.
King also mentions that while there's definitely an abundance of material from the album's writing sessions, he doesn't plan on recording any of it until at least 2018.
“We’ve got lots of leftover material from the last album, ’cause we wrote so much stuff, and we recorded a bunch of it too. If the lyrics don’t change the song musically, those songs are done. So we are way ahead of the ballgame without even doing anything for the next record. And I’ve been working on stuff on my downtime. Like, I’ll warm up and a riff will come to mind and I’ll record it. I’ve gotten a handful of those on this run. So wheels are still turning. I haven’t worked on anything lyrically yet except for what was done on the last record, so that’s something I’ve gotta get on. But, yeah, ‘Repentless‘ isn’t quite a year old yet.”
“Me and Jeff [Hanneman] would usually write ’till we got around the ballpark of a record, and there might be two or three left over, but this time there’s, like, eight left over. Plus a lot of ideas, like half-songs. Like, the first half a song will go with another half a song. So we might be inching up on ten songs already, when I get down and think about it, and that’s very unique for Slayer, and very cool, because can do a one-two punch on this record.”
“We could probably start doing something at the end of next year, but, man, we’ve still got a lot of touring going on next year. So I’m guessing… What’s this… ’16, ’17… I’m guessing it won’t be ’18 before we record anything.”
It'll be interesting to see if the band makes it to 2018 as the band it is currently. Araya has made it extremely well-known that he's pretty much over touring at this point, at which point the band would be down to its final original member – King. That is, assuming Araya doesn't just retire to being a studio-only presence.
All of that hypothetically occurring, will 2018 be the year Slayer puts out an Araya-less record?
