Jeff Hanneman Won’t Be on the New Slayer Album After All

Slayer guitarist Kerry King is angry. The source of the follicularly challenged guitarist’s rage? That the media dared to print something Tom Araya said!

See, last week, Araya said this…

“There is one track on there that we recorded with him, that he did play on, which was completely done except we hadn’t finalized the vocals for it.”

…and we all assumed that meant that Hanneman was actually on the new Slayer album, on account of, y’know, the words “we recorded with him” and “that he did play on.”

How irresponsible of us all! King tells Loudwire:

“Jeff Hanneman isn’t physically playing on this record. Somebody reported some bullshit. People say shit when they don’t know what’s actually going on. Even though Jeff’s song, ‘Piano Wire,’ was recorded during the last album cycle [World Painted Blood], I played all the guitar. I’ve been doing that for years. Since he has no lead on that song, he’s not on it.”

Like I said. Us media-types are such a bunch of lousy assholes.

ANYWAY, King’s dumb comments aside, I don’t think this is terrible news. I mean, sure, it would be really nice to have that one last Hanneman solo… but it’s no secret that he only ever recorded leads for the band, and I’d rather have a new song Hanneman wrote with no Hanneman guitar playing than a new recording of Hanneman playing guitar on a song Kerry King wrote.

(I am assuming Hanneman wrote the song in question because King calls it “Jeff’s song.” My apologies to Mr. King if I was supposed to understand that he meant Jeff Buckley or some other Jeff besides Hanneman.)

In fact, King also says there’s one more Hanneman-penned tune, which won’t be on this new album, but will be on the album after that. You can make your own cynical deductions as to why they sat on that last song.

[via Metal Injection]