Close to five years since the final date of Slayer’s “Final Campaign” farewell tour, the band reunited for an appearance at Chicago’s Riot Fest on Sunday. As any headbanger would expect, they stacked the set list with fan favorites — “South of Heaven,” “War Ensemble,” “Angel of Death” — but they also resuscitated a few surprising songs.
The concert marked the first time since 1998 that the band performed “213,” an eerie deep cut off their 1994 album, Divine Intervention. Frontman Tom Araya wrote the song with guitarist Jeff Hanneman, who died in 2013. It opens with a spidery guitar line before settling into an aggressive groove. At Riot Fest, green light shone from behind the musicians to turn them into silhouettes, making the song even creepier. Then Tom Araya sings: “Driving compulsion, morbid thoughts come to mind/Sexual release buried deep inside.” He wrote the lyrics about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, whose apartment number was 213.
Another welcome surprise was “Reborn,” a skull-rattling thrasher off the second side of Reign in Blood that the band last performed a decade ago. Guitarist Kerry King and Hanneman collaborated on this song, with King penning the lyrics about a “convicted witch” sentenced to death who swears to come back from beyond the grave. “Death means nothing, there’s no end/I will be reborn,” Araya sings. At Riot Fest, King bent over and dug his guitar pick deep into his strings as pyro raged behind him.
After Slayer‘s supposedly final show in 2019, King ceremonially dropped the chains he’s been wearing for years at Slayer concerts. Earlier this year, he released his debut solo album, From Hell I Rise, saying at the time that he had “not even a text, not even an email” from Araya since the last concert. So it was a surprise for fans when King and Araya decided to reunite the last lineup of Slayer for a few shows this year. (Original drummer Dave Lombardo is on the outs with the band, which hired back Paul Bostaph — the drummer on Divine Intervention — in 2013. Guitarist Gary Holt had been filling in for Hanneman, who was recovering from an illness toward the end of his life, and joined Slayer officially in 2013.)
“Nothing compares to the 90 minutes when we’re on stage playing live, sharing that intense energy with our fans, and to be honest, we have missed that,” Araya said in a statement when the reunion was announced.
“Have I missed playing live?” King said. “Absolutely. Slayer means a lot to our fans; they mean a lot to us. It will be five years since we have seen them.”
