Calling all metal fans: Slayer is back. Well, a hybrid version of Slayer, at least. Following the death of guitarist Jeff Hanneman and the departure of drummer Dave Lombardo, Slayer will be touring Europe and South America until October, stopping at Store Vega on August 6.

Hanneman and Lombardo were both co-founding members of the band, and Hanneman was the main songwriter behind most of its best-known tracks. Hanneman died from alcohol-related cirrhosis of the liver this May, and the band fired Lombardo after a pay dispute earlier this year.

The music Hanneman wrote for the band’s eleven studio albums is revered by fans and deemed controversial by critics, in part by the fascination he had with the Second World War since he was a child.

The song ‘Unit 731’ from World Painted Blood was inspired, for example, by a Japanese medical unit from WWII that performed acts of torture in the name of medical research, and ‘Angel of Death’ from 1986‘s seminal Reign in Blood detailed the horrors carried out by Nazi physician Josef Mengele.

Despite the macabre subject matter – or maybe because of it – Slayer became one of the most respected names in metal and one of the ‘Big Four’ of thrash along with Metallica, Megadeth and Anthrax.

The Slayer that will appear on the Vega stage will be made up of the two remaining original members: 1 bassist/vocalist Tom Araya and guitarist Kerry King, along with drummer Paul Bostaph, who had a previous stint with the band from 1994 to 2001, and Exodus’s Gary Holt, who has been filling in for Hanneman since he contracted flesh-eating disease from a spider bite in 2011.

Although some fans have urged the band to call it a career following Hanneman’s death, Slayer have decided to soldier on.

“We’re still pretty numb from the loss of Jeff, but we don’t want to disappoint our European fans, and we need to begin moving forward,” Araya said on the band’s website.

Although the band has been wading through rough waters recently with their guitarist’s death and the firing of Lombardo, Slayer’s sound is still as powerful as it was when they started out in 1981 and even with the new line-up, fans can expect a night of the raw pulsating metal that propelled them to international fame and kept them there for over 30 years.

Slayer
Store Vega; August 6; 20:00; tickets: 395kr; www.vega.dk