The passing of Jeff Hanneman was an event felt hard around the entire metal community. It's never easy losing a legend... especially one who made such an impact on heavy music. But as we stated after the tragedy, his legacy will live on through his music.This is coming into fruition in yet another sense as Slayer is hoping to use two songs written by Jeff on their long awaited eleventh studio album. This is great to hear honestly. I'm really looking forward to hearing more of Jeff's musical ideas before it's all said and done. A sentiment I'm sure that is shared by Slayer fans worldwide.
Tom Araya had the following to say (while speaking with Loudwire).
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We have two songs. I haven’t had the privilege of going through his audio files at the moment, but that’s something I plan to do. Once we get some business squared away, that’s something I plan to do; to go through his music and see what he has. I know that he had several ideas together that he had presented to us in the course of the past year. Before he passed away, there was one complete song that he had managed to send to everybody that I listened to and that I thought was really, really good and communicated that to him. There’s stuff that I thought would be great to listen to just to see what’s there and how we can possibly use what he had done. That’s something I have every intention of doing.
One song was a song we didn’t finish for ‘World Painted Blood.’ That song is actually complete. Me and Jeff were working on melody and lyric ideas for that song. We weren’t really happy with what we were doing or what was becoming of that song, so it didn’t make it on the album.
It was just something we were working on and we couldn’t find anything we were happy with that would work well lyrically and melody-wise, so that’s one reason why that one didn’t make it on the album, but that song is complete, it’s done, it’s ready to go.
I don’t want to use the term ‘typical’ [laughs] but it’s Jeff, it’s obvious who put the song together. It’s Jeff music. He created a certain way and he put music together a certain way; it’s signature Jeff. It’s new, it doesn’t sound like anything else that we’ve done, in my opinion. Jeff usually just wrote songs and a lot of his stuff had certain signature things he would do to songs. That stuff is in there, but I would consider it new.
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Stay tuned for more news on the forthcoming Slayer record. In the meantime, throw your horns up and jam the Jeff Hanneman tracks below!
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