Reign in Blood by Slayer

Reign in Blood, Slayer's third album, came out on Def Jam in 1986, their first for the label and the first with Rick Rubin producing, and his input pushed the band's sound somewhere new. What came out is thrash metal at its most ferocious: Tom Araya barking over his bass, Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King slashing away on guitars, and Dave Lombardo pounding the drums at a speed that seems to defy gravity.

"Angel of Death" deals with Josef Mengele and the human experiments he carried out at Auschwitz, and worries over that subject delayed the album's release; the band said they did not condone Nazism and were only interested in exploring the history. "Raining Blood" is the other monster, a thunderstorm of riffs that comes down like the sky caving in.

Critics loved it, and it put Slayer in front of the mainstream metal crowd for the first time. Along with Metallica's Master of Puppets, Megadeth's Peace Sells... but Who's Buying? and Anthrax's Among the Living, it is credited with defining the sound of American thrash in the mid-'80s. It was their first album to reach the Billboard 200, peaking at number 94, and it went gold in 1992.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.