Forty years after Reign In Blood, Dave Lombardo has been asked the question every member of Slayer gets asked, and his answer is that there was no moment.
"It had to have been, obviously the album was released in 1986, so 87, 88, and then we released South Of Heaven," he told Ed Hack of This Day In Metal. "It was an ongoing process. It wasn't from here to here and overnight."
What told him was other bands. "When they hand you a demo tape and you decide to go to the back of the bus and listen to it, and it sounds exactly like you," he said. "Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but it was obvious."
The second measure was the rooms. He remembers the Hollywood Palladium in their own city, oversold, with a riot outside and police lined up ready to go in. "And it's like, hey, we must be doing something right."
The interview also addresses the reception at the time, which Lombardo says was not uniformly warm. Twenty eight minutes and fifty eight seconds of it, and the reviews caught up later than the imitators did.