When we look back at the present era, we will separate out stuff that was aligned with the mainstream illusion from material that tried to discover an inner truth paired with external reality. Anything outside of the bourgeois Consumerist, Communist, and Christian social bubble will endure.

From the outsiders who opposed the ersatz Potemkin social bubble, heavy metal will stand out with punk and prog as one of the few standout voices, with a few bands like Motörhead, Judas Priest, Slayer, Morbid Angel, and Deicide rising to mythological status.

These acts clarified not just what we were thinking at the time which the mainstream sought frantically to suppress — no one wants to admit that their civilization is dying and not thriving as was widely reported — but portrayed the conflict in a way that invoked our desire to win it and enjoy the process.

When Slayer unleashed Haunting the Chapel way back in 1984, they clarified the discord many of us were feeling with the conservative Christian group that seemed to be holding the nation captive to a corporate-consumerist future that was as dystopian as it was boring.

It turned out that things were more complicated, but as Bud says in Repo Man, “I don’t want no Commies in my car — no Christians either!” He had already made his opinions on consumer society pretty clear by buying generic beers and driving around committing interesting crimes at that point, so rejected the “three Cs” firmly. In the 1980s, we saw only two of them, with Christianity at the helm.

During that era, we were still going to schools where kids who wore all black were sent home, you got paddled for blasphemic curses, and people talked about God like He was a real thing that was going to reach down into our lives and save us from the Soviets! (It turned out that Reagan bluffing them into ignoring their own collapsing civilization worked better, but they still wasted our childhoods on nuclear terror.)

In a time where every politician began speeches with references to the Judeo-Christian “God” (soon to be replaced by “diversity is our strength”) it was heretical to talk about Satanism, much less describe a Miltonian world in which Satan was more interesting than the Protestant work ethic and corporate products! Slayer pushes the boundaries with their topics, but the music went even further.

Opening with “Chemical Warfare,” Haunting the Chapel showed the hardcore influence on Slayer with a droning riff that built momentum instead of killing it like most of its punk forebears, and then led into an epic jagged confrontation riff in the metal style. The union of the two outsider art genres was complete with this new formulation.

The people on television, in courtrooms, and writing the catalogs from which normal people bought products would not have approved of it lyrically either. “Chemical Warfare” combines a real fear of nuclear, biological, and chemical holocaust with a mythology in which evil prevails because humans are oblivious and yet evil is necessary to deliver humanity from its own solipsistic oblivion.

Back then you could get Extended Play (EP) and Long Play (LP) vinyls, sometimes of different sizes; this differentiation lives on in the seven-inch format today, originally designed for singles. Slayer released Haunting the Chapel as a full-size vinyl for $4.99, which was an anti-consumerist revolutionary statement back in the day!

EPs usually were odds and ends, but Slayer made them into an art form of its own. Haunting the Chapel announced the further development of the style Slayer was sculpting, forming a smooth hybrid of punk and metal instead of metal with punk influences or vice-versa. It was their shot across the bow to the future of underground music.

Moving on to “Captor of Sin,” the spinning disc launched into a response to Show No Mercy which translated metal excess into a chaotic and otherworldly sound instead of a Hollywood one, but added foreshadowing of death metal with its epic but grimly realistic style of writing riffs that staged elemental opposites against another to make conflict flower rather than hiding it like normies.

“Captor of Sin” in many ways says goodbye to all that nice comfortable 1970s metal where anthemic songs were designed to lull you into a toe-tapping, hand-clapping, and head-swaying kind of oblivion while you waited for society to break up and vanish in nuclear fire as the Chinese invaded. Instead you get an anthem of battle, preparing us for raging war, full of diligent aggression and a desire to set all things right with a sword.

Our recording concludes with its title track which presages the following Slayer albums by making a trudging, churning pattern go uptempo and, instead of like in most bands continuing in the chorus, approaching a vertiginous space into which the inversion of the trudge drops through a high-speed riff that conserves momentum and slings the listener on into a higher-intensity struggle.

Although it is a relatively short recording at 13:33, the Haunting the Chapel EP feels like a new world because it was. Slayer finalized the style they were feeling out on their first album and hammered out a voice for what would become underground metal that was comprised of the best of metal and punk from Discharge to Judas Priest.

In many ways, it was also the pause before the storm. It would be hard to dislike Show No Mercy, but the three albums that followed — Hell Awaits, Reign in Blood, and especially South of Heaven — defined a new language for music in which metal both matured and adamantly refused to “grow up” and become a cucked television normie.

With these four releases, Slayer laid out a vocabulary of technique and a lexicon of riffological symbolism that unleashed underground metal upon the world. Even though this happened forty years ago, as the same conflicts that divided the world back then revisit us, the eternal spirit of Slayer guides us toward the future apocalyptic battles we will enjoy fighting in the dystopian wasteland.

Tags: cold war, death metal, Satanism, slayer, Speed Metal, underground metal