Description

The painter behind one of metal's most violent covers made his living drawing politics. Larry Carroll was producing political illustrations for The Progressive, the Village Voice and The New York Times when the producer Rick Rubin hired him to paint the sleeve for Slayer's first album on Def Jam. The result is a crowded vision of hell in dark reds and browns, centred on a horned, goat-headed figure enthroned and carried above a sea of tormented bodies.

The band did not all love it. "Nobody in the band wanted that cover. We were stuck with it," Kerry King said. Singer Tom Araya felt the opposite: he "thought it was amazing" and "liked it immediately." According to Araya, three different versions were considered at the concept stage, and the final painting combined elements of all three. Carroll went on to paint the covers of South of Heaven, Seasons in the Abyss and Christ Illusion, giving Slayer a visual identity as consistent as its sound.

The album nearly had no distributor. Columbia, which distributed Def Jam, refused to handle it, and Araya later said the objection was to the lyrics of "Angel of Death", a song about the Holocaust. Geffen Records finally distributed it in October 1986, without putting its own logo on the sleeve. Reign in Blood became a landmark of thrash metal, and in 2006 Blender named its cover one of the ten best heavy metal album covers.

Credit

Cover painting by Larry Carroll