Twenty eight minutes and fifty five seconds. Ten songs. Not one of them is a death metal song, and without those twenty eight minutes there is no death metal. Both halves of that sentence are true, which is why this question gets asked more often than any other genre question in heavy music and why the lazy answers to it are all wrong.
The short answer
No. Slayer are a thrash metal band, from the first demo in 1982 to the last show, and every test that decides such things returns thrash. What makes the question worth answering properly is that Slayer are also the single largest influence on death metal from outside death metal, and the debt is specific, datable and enormous. MTV once put it flatly: Slayer's music was directly responsible for the rise of death metal. A genre can be built out of a band without that band belonging to it.
The quarry that half a genre cut its stone from is Hell Awaits, released by Metal Blade on 8 April 1985 and recorded at Eldorado in Los Angeles with Brian Slagel and the band producing. It runs thirty seven minutes and it is murkier, slower in places and considerably nastier than anything else in thrash at the time. Morbid Angel's Trey Azagthoth has described it as a milestone and said it gave him a lot of inspiration. Possessed were working out of the same material in the Bay Area the same year. Songs from it have been covered by Incantation and by half the underground since.
Four things death metal took
The debt is not a vague matter of attitude. Four specific things went across, and you can hear all four on any record made in Tampa between 1988 and 1993.
The riff writing came first. Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King built figures out of the tritone and out of chromatic movement, notes walking in half steps without settling anywhere, at a time when almost every other thrash band was still writing recognisable shapes in E minor descended from British heavy metal. Death metal took that and made it the default rather than the special effect.
The lead guitar came second, and it is the most copied thing about the band. Two guitarists trading atonal runs and whammy bar dives with next to no blues phrasing anywhere in them. Before Slayer, a metal solo was a melody. After Slayer, in this corner of the music, a solo could be a controlled accident.
The tempo came third. Dave Lombardo's right foot and the speed of Reign in Blood, out on Def Jam in October 1986 and recorded at Hit City West with Rick Rubin producing and Andy Wallace engineering, set a bar that every extreme drummer in the following decade tried to clear. The blast beat is what happens when a generation of drummers decides that bar was not high enough.
The subject matter came fourth. Slayer wrote about atrocity, medical horror and religion in a register nobody else in 1983 was using in earnest, and the entire lyrical apparatus of the genre that followed is downstream of it.
A genre can be quarried out of a band without that band ever belonging to it. Everything death metal needed was in Slayer. Slayer just never used it that way.
Four tests they fail
Now the other column, and it is not close either.
- The voice. Tom Araya shouts, and the shout has pitch in it and words you can follow. A death metal vocal is a growl produced below the range where consonants survive. This is the clearest single difference and it settles most of the argument on its own.
- The tuning. Slayer spent almost their whole career in standard or in E flat. Down tuning is not a decoration in death metal, it is the structural condition that makes the riff writing possible.
- The beat. The engine is the thrash skank beat and the galloping downstroke. No blast beats. Lombardo is faster than nearly everyone who came after him and he is playing a different pattern.
- The song. Slayer write verses and choruses, even at ninety seconds. Death metal is built in riff blocks that are used once and abandoned. Put Reign in Blood next to Altars of Madness and the difference in construction is audible inside twenty seconds.
Four out of four. There is no honest reading of the recorded evidence in which this band is death metal.
The one time they tuned down
It is worth knowing that Slayer did eventually tune down, because the fact cuts against the argument people usually make with it. Diabolus in Musica, released on 9 June 1998 through American Recordings with Rick Rubin producing, was the first Slayer album written predominantly in C sharp. It entered the Billboard 200 at 31 and sold 46,000 copies in its first week.
And it moved them toward nu metal rather than toward this genre. The reviews at the time said so, the churning mid tempo grooves on it say so, and Kerry King has since called it his least favourite record the band ever made. When Slayer finally reached for the low tuning that death metal is built on, they used it to chase something else entirely. That is about as clean a piece of evidence as a genre argument ever gets.
Why the debt matters more than the label
People asking this question are usually asking something else underneath it, which is whether Slayer count. They count more than almost anybody. Being the source of a genre is a larger thing than being a member of it, and it is the reason every death metal band of the first wave can name a Slayer record and almost none of them can name a Slayer imitation they made.
What the founders took from Hell Awaits was not a style to copy. It was permission, plus a set of techniques nobody else was using, and they went away and built something Slayer never attempted and by all accounts never wanted to. Death and Possessed did the building. Slayer supplied the raw material and then spent thirty five years making Slayer records instead, which was the right decision.
So: no, and it does not matter, and both of those are the point. If this is the first genre argument you have had and you want the ground rules rather than the verdict, what Is Death Metal lays out the tests used above, and every band that passes all four of them is in the band list.
