“Angel of Death” by Slayer

"Angel of Death" opens Reign in Blood, Slayer's 1986 album, and it sets the pace for the whole relentless record. Jeff Hanneman wrote both music and words, and his subject is a grim one: the experiments the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele carried out on prisoners at Auschwitz.

Rick Rubin produced it with the band for Def Jam, with Andy Wallace engineering, and the sound is bone-dry and brutal. Hanneman and Kerry King saw at their guitars like chainsaws, Dave Lombardo's drums come down like a hailstorm, and Tom Araya howls the lyrics over his own bass. Then the whole thing drops into a crushing half-time riff that Public Enemy later sampled for "She Watch Channel Zero?!"

The song brought accusations that the band held Nazi sympathies and racist views; Slayer strongly denied them, but the charges dogged their early years and held up the album's release. None of it cost the song its place in the set: it has turned up on every one of their live albums, and it has been credited with shaping the growth of thrash and speed metal.

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