South of Heaven by Slayer

South of Heaven, Slayer's fourth studio album, came out on Def Jam on July 5, 1988, and it's the sound of a band smart enough not to try outrunning Reign in Blood. Instead, Tom Araya, Kerry King, Jeff Hanneman and Dave Lombardo hit the brakes on purpose: slower tempos that grind instead of blur, stretches of clean, undistorted guitar, and Araya reining his shriek back to a menacing bark. The dread only gets thicker for it, especially on the title track and "Mandatory Suicide", which have been near-permanent fixtures of their live sets ever since.

The business side was its own horror show. Columbia, Def Jam's distributor, wouldn't handle the band, so the record went out through Geffen and Warner Bros., and it was their last for Def Jam before the rights moved to Rick Rubin's new Def American label. Critics mostly cheered, though listeners hooked on the old velocity were let down. It reached 57 on the Billboard 200 and went gold in 1992.

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