Hear Slayer's Eerie New Song, 'When The Stillness Comes'

Thrash metal kingpins Slayer have let rip their first new tune in close to a year. The single, dubbed When The Stillness Comes, has been released in honour of tomorrow’s Record Store Day.

Sliced off the band’s forthcoming album, the new track is not your typical Slayer all-out riff assault, at least not to start off with. Instead, it builds there slowly and ominously, kicking off with an eerily soft, spidery guitar line and moving into doomy, down-tempo verses before reaching the big payoff at the end.

And it’s also sporting some pretty brutal subject matter. Guitarist Kerry King has told Rolling Stone it’s about “a dude who wakes up at a crime scene and realizes he’s killed everybody”.

“We were touring Europe and we had a three-hour ride in some fucking minivan, and I’m just miserable in the backseat, not into anything. So I just stated jotting down hateful thoughts.” Shit, eh?

When The Stillness Comes is one of 12 new Slayer songs which will feature on the follow-up to 2009’s World Painted Blood. The LP, produced by Terry Date (Pantera, White Zombie), also represents the band’s first album since the death of founding guitarist Jeff Hanneman in 2013 as well as the departure of drummer Dave Lombardo. It’s due for a tentative August release.

King says he’s not nervous at all about unveiling the finished product. “I know there’s gonna be naysayers,” he told Rolling Stone. “I know there’s gonna be people expecting us to fail, because so many things changed in the last six years. I’m prepared for that ’cause I know humans are just retards when they get on the Internet. But I know we put a good product together. I’m proud of it.”

Slayer last visited Australia as part of Soundwave 2013.

Listen: Slayer – When The Stillness Comes