A Perfect Circle have announced a North American fall tour, with support from the Beta Machine. The trek, which kicks off October 21 with a headlining set at the Aftershock festival in Sacramento, California, and wraps up December 4 in Eugene, Oregon, marks the second leg of the supergroup's first extended outing since 2014. A Perfect Circle's line-up for this tour comprises Maynard James Keenan (duh), Billy Howerdel, James, Iha, Jeff Friedl and Matt McJunkins (Ashes Divide, Puscifer). Check out the whole itinerary below.

A Perfect Circle's last album, eMOTIVe, came out in 2004. In 2013, they released a new song, "By And Down". Earlier this year, Howerdel revealed that the group had signed to BMG, and were working on a new record. The band subsequently shot down rumors that the long-awaited LP would arrive this year, responding to fans' queries via Twitter with a quipped "not true".  

The same goes for Maynard James Keenan's other band, Tool; Despite sharing a mysterious trailer in March and kicking off their spring tour with the previously-unheard "Feathers", the group have yet to formally announce their first new album in over a decade.
 

Oct. 21 - Sacramento, CA - Aftershock Festival
Oct. 23 - Colorado Springs, CO - Broadmoor World Arena
Oct. 25 - Albuquerque, NM - Tingley Coliseum
Oct. 26 - El Paso, TX - UTEP Don Haskins Center
Oct. 30 - Knoxville, TN - Thompson-Boling Arena
Nov. 01 - Fairfax, VA - EagleBank Arena
Nov. 02 - Brooklyn, NY - Tidal Theater @ Barclays Center
Nov. 04 - Reading, PA - Santander Arena
Nov. 05 - Uncasville, CT - Mohegan Sun Arena
Nov. 07 - Camden, NJ - BB&T Pavilion
Nov. 08 - Boston, MA - Agganis Arena
Nov. 10 - Portland, ME - Cross Insurance Center
Nov. 11 - Albany, NY - Times Union Center
Nov. 12 - Syracuse, NY - The Oncenter
Nov. 14 - Montreal, QC - Laval Centre
Nov. 15 - Toronto, ON - Air Canada Centre
Nov. 17 - Pittsburgh, PA - Petersen Events Center
Nov. 18 - Cleveland, OH - Wolstein Center at Cleveland State University
Nov. 19 - Highland Heights, KY - BB&T Arena at Northern Kentucky University
Nov. 21 - Detroit, MI - Fox Theatre
Nov. 22 Grand Rapids, MI - The DeltaPlex Arena
Nov. 24 Chicago, IL - UIC Pavilion
Nov. 25 St. Paul, MN - Xcel Energy Center
Nov. 28 Spokane, WA - Spokane Arena
Nov. 30 Vancouver, British Columbia - PNE Coliseum
Dec. 01 Seattle, WA - KeyArena at Seattle Center
Dec. 02 Portland, OR - Veteran's Memorial Coliseum
Dec. 04 Eugene, OR - Matthew Knight Arena

With a stint booked on this summer's Warped Tour, Municipal Waste were already positioned to gain more mainstream exposure — even before an unexpected mention by comedian Kathy Griffin's attorney at a widely covered press conference.

"That was so crazy," acknowledges vocalist Tony Foresta. "I was on vacation with my girlfriend. I came out of the bathroom after a shower and I saw, like, 100 text messages about the whole thing."

Foresta is referring to the recent controversy around Griffin posing for a photo holding a fake but all-too-real-looking severed head of President Trump. She was subsequently fired by CNN as Anderson Cooper's sidekick on their New Year's Eve special. In an effort to defend Griffin, her lawyer referenced Municipal Waste, Marilyn Manson and Gwar. "The band Municipal Waste has an image of Trump with a bloody gunshot to his head on a band T-shirt," the attorney proclaimed. "They're all just considered bad boys. Unlike these male artists, Kathy apologized."

"I just think it's funny that we got called 'bad boys,'" Foresta says.

As a band best known for playing rapid-fire thrash songs about hard partying and graphically violent sci-fi movies, often featuring pointedly puerile titles (example: "Guilty of Being Tight"), Municipal Waste have never been ones for political correctness. So Foresta and his bandmates — guitarists Ryan Waste and Nick Poulos, bassist Phil "Landphil" Hall and drummer Dave Witte — seem more amused than anything to be dragged into the Griffin scandal. Though the singer does feel bad for the comic.

"Why the fuck is it a big deal that she's doing what Brujeria did [on their 1993 full-length, Matando Güeros, which depicted a purportedly real gangster holding a decapitated head on its cover], you know what I mean?" Foresta says. "Maybe it's because she's mainstream. But I think everyone should have the right to desecrate Donald Trump's body. It's just fucked up that she's being victimized for it."

True to these words, Foresta's band pulls no punches on its new album, Slime and Punishment; songs like "Shrednecks," "Bourbon Discipline" and "Low Tolerance" charge forward with the kind of classic thrash licks and hilariously sophomoric lyrics that fans have come to expect. But the record is no rehash of Municipal Waste's last LP, 2012's The Fatal Feast (Waste in Space). With Slime and Punishment, Municipal Waste — a band that fans might picture spending less time crafting songs than shotgunning beers — worked hard to challenge themselves musically. They even threw away an entire album's worth of material they weren't happy with and started again from scratch.

"The thing is, everyone had really busy touring schedules with their other bands," explains Foresta, referencing Municipal Waste side projects including Iron Reagan, Cannabis Corpse, Volture and Bat. "Two and a half years ago, when we started working on the new Municipal Waste, we liked what we were coming up with, but when we looked back at it, it wasn't up to the quality that we wanted. We were all scattered and not on the same page at that point. So we ditched, like, 12 songs, and started again."

With second guitarist Nick Poulos (Bat, Volture, ex-Cannabis Corpse) onboard, Municipal Waste were able to expand and diversify their sound. In addition to integrating their newest member, Municipal Waste have strived to balance their side projects from their main gig and taken strides to break the conception some people still have that they're little more than an exceptionally talented comedy band. We recently talked to Foresta about all the above and more.

REVOLVER Slime and Punishment is another fun, furious Municipal Waste album, but it has more diverse riffs and better mosh sections. Did you have a good time making it or was it a struggle?
TONY FORESTA We matured as a band over the past five years. We did a lot of relentless touring the first two years after we did The Fatal Feast. Touring like that was hard, so to mix things up a little, we started writing an album at around the two-and-a-half-year mark of the tour. And that turned out not to be such a good idea. So when we started writing again last year and got Nick in the band, that helped focus us even more to write a great album. The hardest thing is getting everyone on the same page, but once we're all together the good stuff happens. I think this is the best record we've ever done.  

You and Land Phil toured pretty hard for Iron Reagan's last album, The Tyranny of the Will, and Phil toured with Cannabis Corpse, as well. Was it hard to get back into the Municipal Waste mindset after that?
When you're working with different people, everyone has different ways of doing stuff. In Iron Reagan, we write stuff differently, but it's also refreshing to play with people that you haven't seen in a while. The frustrating part is coordinating the schedules and getting everyone to focus at the same time. 

You guys recorded and then scrapped a whole Municipal Waste record.
That was when the Iron Reagan tour schedule started. It got pretty crazy so we wrote every once in a while for Municipal Waste. By the time we got together to do the demo five months later we forgot how we did the songs. So we changed things around and tried to get focused again. It was overwhelming at times. I still have demos of a bunch of the songs. They have lyrics and vocals and everything. But it wasn't clicking. The stuff didn't make us go, "All right, cool. That's a great song."  

You're a crossover-thrash band with a reputation for being goofballs and drinking heavily. It might surprise people that you scrapped a whole album and didn't go, "Yeah, fuck it, that's good enough. Now, where' the bong?"
We're goofy, but we take our music very seriously and we tour really hard. We make sure our instruments are tuned and everything sounds as good as it can. We care about it, and not just for us. We really want to deliver something that people want to listen to. So, we take that shit real seriously — even though we are ridiculous human beings.

Why did you decide to bring Nick Poulos into the band?
I have been trying to get him in for years. I always wanted a second guitar player for live because it pushes the sound and makes it real heavy. There's only a few people in the world that we all get along with and want to be around, so that was always kind of an issue, but everyone agreed Nick was perfect. He helped to inspire everyone to write stuff. Plus, he had some good ideas of his own.

How do you know him?
He's been a friend of mine for over 10 years. We're both from Florida. I got him a gig for playing in D.R.I. five or six years ago when Spike Cassidy was sick. They had to play a show in South America and didn't know what to do. I said, "Look, I know a solid dude that will rip a guitar," and sure enough he learned the songs, flew down there and three days later he was jamming with them. That's the kinda guy he is. He is a stand-up dude.

You released your breakthrough album, The Art of Partying, almost exactly 10 years ago. At the time, you were lumped into a scene of retro thrash revivalists that included bands like Evile, Warbringer, Bonded by Blood and Toxic Holocaust. Did that help push you to the next rung of popularity?
I don't know, but we kinda hated that. The reason we were grouped in with them was because the label we were on [Earache Records] were trying to sign on any thrash band at the time and attach them to us. It was strange. They wanted us to be the flagbearer for them and I was like, "C'mon, dude. I don't even listen to half this shit." I think Toxic Holocaust is great, but a lot of the other bands were forced and weirdly trendy. They were way oversaturated and cheapened everything.

Was that offensive to you as dedicated crossover revivalists?
It just seemed contrived. I mean, every fucking band had a neon green logo. It made us like, "Ugh!" You wouldn't believe the amount of times that our label tried to get us to take out those bands on tour. And if we didn't want to listen to their music or tour with them, then we didn't do it. We stuck to our guns. And that's what we still do today.

On January 9th, 2016 Corey Taylor joined Metal Allegiance — the supergroup featuring Testament's Alex Skolnick and Megadeth's Dave Ellefson, among others — for a rousing cover of Motörhead's "Ace of Spades" at the band's show at the Whisky a Go Go in L.A., in honor of Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister, who died on December 28th, 2015. Also joining in on the performance was ex-Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo. Watch above.

"I apologize that I sound a little rough. I haven't had much sleep the past two or three nights," says Touché Amoré's Jeremy Bolm (pictured above, center). "It's been overnight drives and I'm the night driver." When Revolver catches up with the vocalist, he's in Detroit on day two of the band's tour opening for AFI, a seemingly unlikely slot for his group.

"Opening for this tour is a different ballgame," Bolm admits. "We normally aren't dealing with this much so fast. I think the Riot Fest thing, having to play around it, and starting a tour in the Midwest—all those things added together were giving us this real-shit scenario."

Revolver talks to Bolm about "shit scenarios," opening for a "life-changing" band, starting a zine, and Touché Amoré's third album, Is Survived By.

REVOLVER Between the album title and some of the lyrics, the new record seems to have a theme of how people are remembered. Is that accurate?

JEREMY BOLM That's exactly what it is. It's funny because I realized "Is Survived By" almost strictly an American phase and I hadn't thought about if they use the same phase in obituaries in other countries. I've had a couple interviews where I've had to explain it. It's an ongoing theme throughout the record of the idea of mortality, how you will be remembered, and how you think you may be living your life one way but people might be seeing you another way. They don't have control over it, so it's doing your best to leave a positive mark on this world.

So what brought on that theme? I turned 30 this year and while we were writing the record I felt like turning 30 was that looking at life as a bigger picture moment, whereas when you're in your 20s you still think you're a teenager. Also punk rock stunts your growth. [Laughs] I was trying to look at life with a clear picture. My mom's health isn't doing so hot at the moment so I'm just trying to take a step back and look at things like that.

People say your music has helped them through their dark times. How does that affect you? I mean, that's the best thing about music, in general, is that you might be writing a song that is emotional and about hard times and things like that but it can help the next person that listens to it because it makes them feel like they're not alone. So I just love that I've had an effect on anyone like that—that our band can have that same feeling that I had for tons of other bands.

Your lyrics are incredibly honest and personal, whether it's what you say or your pronoun usage of "I." Do you ever wish you didn't say something you did? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I made a promise to myself, and I talk about it on the second song of the record, that if people are willing to listen to me then I'm going to lay it all out on the table and not hold anything back because I don't want to feel like I'm robbing anyone. It has affected relationships before—not too drastically but there have been things that I've said that I didn't have the courage to say to that person directly and then they obviously realized it's about them. There hasn't been a moment yet where I wanted to take something back, but there are definitely songs that I've written that in the heat of the moment and now those relationships have mended. Now when I sing those songs live, I just think about them in another way so it's not like I'm singing about something I have no actual feelings for anymore.

That second song is "To Write Content." In the lyrics you describe a conversation and you say, "It's hard to write content/And it still is." Who are you talking to? It's actually about Andy Hull in Manchester Orchestra. We were on tour with Circa Survive last year and one of the openers on the tour was O'Brother and they recorded their record with Andy Hull. And Johnny [Dang, O'Brother guitarist] introduced me to Andy. So we're playing in New York City, we meet and hit it off. We both were like finishing each others sentences where it's like, "I am a much happier person today than I was writing the last bunch of records. I'm in a band that I'm so proud of that has taken me way beyond any of my expectations, getting to see places I never thought I'd go, meeting kids every day that have kind words to say. What do I have to complain about?" He and I are going back and forward and he's saying the same thing, "I married my best friend. What do I have to complain about?" That's why he said, "Yup. It's hard to write content." It just hit me like a ton of bricks. In a few simple words, you laid it out completely. It's 100 percent where I was at. So when it came to start writing the record, it just hit me like I'm gonna write a record about how hard it is to write a record [laughs] and I reference that conversation.

To shift to touring, you're out with AFI. How did that come about? We were struggling with the original idea of doing a headlining tour, but everyone we wanted to tour with wasn't available or was already waiting on something else. Then AFI had recently signed with the management company we're represented by and they were looking to tour in the fall. Some of the guys in the band, like, grew up on AFI, like, since childhood—a favorite band of all time. So obviously when the offer came up, we obviously jumped at it. We were like, "Holy shit, of course. If we're gonna do a support tour, that's the one to do." They haven't toured in years and they're a life-changing band. Obviously we're flattered to be a part of it.

It's not two bands I imagine in the same room together. Is that hard? It's a little bit nerve-wracking for me because they're such a cult band where they kind of have that Slayer aspect to their fan base where you get the vibe the crowd is there to see that specific thing and they don't really care about the other things. I was warned about that. We started and it was just a sea of blank faces, but by the end of the set, we had people clapping along. I enjoy working over a crowd because it can remind you that not everything is going to be easy. So I like the challenge, the challenge is fun. We actually opened the set with the song we usually close with. We were like, "Yeah, we'll start right out the gate with, like, with most known song in hopes that everyone goes nuts." [Laughs] But it was just dead. [Laughs]

I think nevertheless it has to be good exposure. Yeah, I hope so. You get in your head about it because you're playing and not seeing people lose their mind, but when you're walking around after the show, they have the nicest fans in the world. Everyone kept coming up to our merch table shaking hands and telling us how much they liked it. That's all you can ever really hope for with a support tour, that you win a couple of people over and come back the next time.

You guys have a bond with your fans. I remember seeing Touché Amoré live in New York years ago and there was an issue with security, and you guys jumped right off the stage and into the crowd. Yeah, absolutely. I think that should be anyone's responsibility if they care about their fans. I know there's a time and place to act out and a lot of bigger bands have tour mangers to watch for things like that. That was a situation where it was a small girl who got face-palmed by a guy three times her size and it was like, Come on. It was a bad situation.

So how does opening affect the new set list? On this tour, we get 45 minutes. That's a really long set for our band. [Laughs] That's like two of your albums. Yeah, we're playing 21 songs. When we were out with Circa Survive, we were playing 21 or 22 songs and their set list is, like, 13 or 14. [Laughs] So we're just powering through. We get to play a lot of new songs, too, which is nice because we've playing the same songs for X amount of time and we're playing them for people who've never heard our band anyway.

Since you brought up length, this is the first record to almost reach the half-hour mark. Did you try to lengthen songs? I think it's exactly 30 minutes. It's something that happened completely naturally in the same regard that we write such short songs. We never set out to be like we're going to be the band that writes minute-long songs. We just have short attention spans. We don't want to drag a part on for too long because there's no need for it. We've always had a get-in and get-out attitude about writing songs.

You released a zine, Down Time, which has some thoughts, advice, and stories. Can you tell us a bit more about that? We were done writing the record and I was like, OK, it's May. What the fuck am I going to do for the rest of the time? With my label [Secret Voice], I didn't want to just put out 7"s, I wanted to do zines and all sorts of different things. So this was just a test to see how it would go—a quick run of 500. The fact that I sold them in 12 hours was just the most overwhelming thing ever which also helped because it gave me the ability to help my folks with money and pay off bills. When it comes to writing stuff, I never really had it in me to be, like, a poetry guy or anything like that, but I found myself challenging myself to try my hand at this. I used to do a lot of freelance writing myself for different publications in my early 20's, like, for LA Weekly. My first time interviewing anybody was interviewing Jake Bannon from Converge. So I found that interview and I was so excited. I hit up Jake and asked if he minded if I put that in here because it's kind of a cool thing to reflect on. It's funny because I reread the interview, and a lot of the answers he gives, I can completely relate to now being somewhat in the same shoes—where he talks about touring things and label things. I'm really proud of it. I'm hoping to do more over time.

Since you have some things in common with Jake, he said he never wanted to be a frontman and he felt shy. Do you feel similar or did you always want the mic? I always played guitar in bands because I wanted to play an instrument so I started playing guitar when I was in junior high. I hit my peak of talent at about 9th grade and I never got better from there. It was very basic, like, I learned the barre chord and the power chord. I bottomed-out pretty quickly and everyone became so much better than me and I couldn't keep up. I always wanted to try singing in a band, but I never really felt very confident about it for a lot of reasons and I decided to try my hand at it and I'm glad I did because it's obviously been a really fun experience. When it comes to bands, I was always infatuated with the vocalist, never the guitar player, so I'm glad I gave it a shot.

The headbanging legends in Slayer have had a rollercoaster of a 2010. Hell, one doesn't even headbang anymore. After releasing World Painted Blood last year, the band had planned an epic tour this year, which they sidelined due to vocalist-bassist Tom Araya needing surgery for chronic back pain. The frontman was back onstage by mid-summer—even if he wasn't headbanging—and, with that, the group began hitting high after high.

First, it rekindled its relationship with fellow thrashers Megadeth, and toured with the group in the U.S. Then, Slayer joined Megadeth, Anthrax, and Metallica for a string of European festivals showcasing the Big Four of Thrash. (All of the bands played a rendition of Diamond Head and Metallica staple "Am I Evil?" in Sofia, Bulgaria, for a live broadcast, but drummer Dave Lombardo was the only Slayer member to participate. Warner Bros. is releasing a DVD of the shows on November 2.) They then headlined the massive Wacken Fest in front of 10s of thousands of metalheads, and now they're heading back out with Megadeth and Anthrax on the Jägermeister Musictour, which kicks off today.

If that wasn't enough career highs, next year marks the 30th anniversary of Slayer. In celebration, the band is putting out a couple of retrospective box sets this year: the Slayer Live DVD 3-Pack, out now, contains 1995's Live Intrusion, 2003's War at the Warfield, and 2004's Still Reigning, and the band's label, American Recordings, is reissuing all of the band's albums from Reign in Blood through World Painted Blood on high-quality vinyl as the box set The Vinyl Conflict. Revolver recently caught up with King, who spends his spare time (when he has spare time) raising snakes in Los Angeles, to look back on what's made Slayer so great.

REVOLVER What has the highlight of the year been for you so far?
KERRY KING Probably the Big Four shows, because going in, I didn't think it was as special as it ended up being. I thought it was gonna be really cool for the fans and kind of cool for me, but I had the time of my life. It was fun. Being a part of it made me realize how important that tour was.

Why didn't you play in the Big Four jam on "Am I Evil" at the end?
There's a damn good reason. It isn't too long an explanation. [Dave] Mustaine came to me that day and James [Hetfield] came to me that day saying, "Hey, it would be really cool if you played." I knew Jeff [Hanneman, Slayer guitarist] wouldn't do it, and I knew Tom wouldn't do it. And I also knew after we played that neither one of them would edit our video that was going to cinemas in a couple hours, so I told James and Mustaine both, "Listen, man. I've gotta edit our video before I can even think about playing with you guys." So the entire time of the set change between Slayer and Metallica, I was editing that video. I came running to the tuning room after I got done picking the songs, and they were already onstage.

And to make it an even better story, I found out at 1 a.m. the night prior, so I really had no chance to work on that stuff or anything. So I wanted to; it just couldn't happen. I've got a lot of flack for that but yeah, that's the story.

Next year is Slayer's 30th anniversary. What do you consider Slayer's biggest accomplishment to be?
Ha. Staying together for 30 years. [Laughs] That seems to be the thing that at the end of most bands: people think one's better than the other. Or, I can't get along with this guy today so fuck him, I'm leaving. At the end of the day, we've got this gig doing what we do and if I don't like somebody one day, hey, the next day, it's all new.

What is it about you four people, who have played together since high school, that keeps it going?
I think when you get older, realizing the fact that you don't have to be best friends. You don't have to hang out all the time. Usually we get home, and we scatter like cockroaches, and that's my best advice to anybody. [Laughs] Just going home and being you.

What do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment outside of Slayer?
Keeping Slayer together for 30 years. [Laughs] Fuck, I don't know. That's been my life since I was a teenager, so there's not a whole lot going on. I've got a pretty decent reputation in the snake world. So I would say, just last season I produced the third of [one breed's] kind in the world.

What specific kind?
It's a morph of a jungle carpet python. It's called a super zebra. I still have the only one outside of Germany. So there's this one, and now the guy in Germany has produced two or three more. So I think there's six or seven [in the world]. But this is still the only one on this continent. So that's kind of an accomplishment.

They started out with what a jungle carpet python looks like, the zebra is a morph, and you've gotta breed a zebra to another to get what is called a super zebra. In the wild, that never would have happened. The odds of it happening are very slim.

What are you going to do with it?
Since that's the only one here, I could sell it for a ton of money. But I'm gonna keep it and grow it up and breed it with some other stuff.

Going back to Slayer. Since we're talking about your history, what was your first taste of success?
Maybe the first time somebody asked for an autograph. When you're not expecting it, that hits you off the wall.

And now you've probably signed millions.
Oh, I was out for two and a half hours running errands today and I signed a couple, took some pictures. [Laughs]

What's been your favorite rumor about Slayer over the years?
The beauty and fucking horror of the internet is information right away. If people see you doing anything, they just assume that's what you do. I've seen some site where people say what kind of car I have. Somebody might have seen me borrow somebody's truck and that's what they think I own. [Laughs] It's funny how people see something and they just put it on like it's the gospel. It's amazing. The internet's a great thing and it's also a fucking cancer.

What about the pre-internet era?
How do I put it? We're Nazi, fascist, satanist, and I'm sure there's a couple lines I'm forgetting.

Obviously you guys have debunked that over the years.
Oh, absolutely. But once people get an idea in their head, the hardest thing is talking them out of that idea.

Was playing "Angel of Death" ever a problem in Germany?
I don't think so. Maybe in the early days there might have been a little… I can't even remember, that's why I'm not commenting on it. People over there like the song because it's a cool song. For the longest time in the early days, they were more concerned with the "S" in Slayer, because it looked like a Nazi S. A couple times over there, we altered it a little bit in the beginning. It's morphed over the years to different ways we write it anyway. There's still the original one, but then there was that scratchy one that was less Nazi. That's not why we did it; we just thought it looked cool for that particular album. I think that was on the God Hates Us All album. The scratchy logo.

Well, was the original "S" in Slayer based on the SS?
I don't think so. I can't even remember who came up with it. I think it was our manager friend at the time. I don't even know if it was him and Lombardo working on it or how that came together. We ended up on that and I can't remember how.

I was looking at some early video and pictures of Slayer. You used to wear those big nail gauntlets. Did you ever have any problems with those?
Very early. It wasn't even an accident. When I used to have a cable, instead of being wireless, I got pulled into the crowd, when we used to get too close to the crowd anyway. I kind of went down—I didn't go down, I kind of landed on a knee. And I still had my guitar on, and I just kind of swung my arm to get people away from me, and they scattered like ants. [Laughs] I wasn't looking to hurt anybody, I just wanted to make sure I didn't get hurt.

Why did you want to reissue three of Slayer's DVDs recently?
I don't know. I don't understand that at all. [Laughs] I don't work with the record company. The one I was talking about for years and years and years was Live Intrusion. I couldn't understand why that wasn't a DVD. Me suggesting that seven, eight years ago, whenever that was, it morphed into all three in one pack. I'm sure it's just record-company positioning, saying, "Here, get all three at once, and here's this cool pack."

Did you rewatch any of them?
No, they came out since I've been on tour. I wanna see Live Intrusion, because I haven't seen it in years.

What were some of the moments over the years where you felt you were doing something special?
Probably the first time we played what was Download, what was Donnington [in the U.K.]. I think the first time we played it, it still was Donnington. Being a kid, growing up with the European mags, you just have an idea of what it might be. You have no idea what it really was, because nothing here is anything like it. So I think we did that in '94. I think Metallica was on the show, too. But it was our first time. I think it was [drummer Paul] Bostaph's second or third performance, of all things, and it was just awesome. We performed really well. It was one of those ones you just look back and say, "Man, I'm glad that was a good one."

The Big Four thing, that was really cool, like we touched on. The downpoint, probably this year, was waiting for Tom to get done with his surgery, because we had six, seven months off. We're usually used to touring. And I had this great idea of writing half a record during those six, seven months, but it just turned into a party. There was no guitar to be played.

How is Tom doing now?
Tom's good. He's not headbanging, but he's doing his gig really awesome and sounds great, so that's all you can ask of him.

You've mentioned the Big Four a few times, what is your relationship with Metallica like these days?
It's better than it's ever been. Not that we had any beefs with each other. Oddly enough we just completely ran in different circles. I went into this tour not really thinking Metallica were my friends. I've known Trujillo since Suicidal, and I speak to Lars off and on, historically, but leaving this tour I feel like they're all my friends. I feel bad I didn't get to play "Am I Evil?" but I had a good time. When time allowed, I would go into Lars' World—you know, the little section right behind where he plays—and me and Dave would be back there watching the show. I got to see it there three nights out of the six or seven, and it was just fun.

Have you talked about the possibility of doing it in the U.S.?
Every chance I get. [Laughs]

Were Metallica originally supposed to be on the upcoming shows with Megadeth and Anthrax?
When Anthrax got brought up for the second leg, I'm like, "I'm into it." I said, "I just don't want it to have any adverse effects on the Big Four coming here." I was assured it wouldn't, so we'll see how that goes.

You're playing Seasons in the Abyss on the Jägermeister tour, and last time you did that tour, you played Reign in Blood. Why won't you be playing South of Heaven in your classic album tours?
Well, that's definitely my least favorite of the three. One of those songs on there, "Cleanse the Soul," I hate that fuckin' song. There's a Priest song on there ["Dissident Agressor"], which I love, but I don't think that condones redoing a record, because you have a cover, for one, and a song that I, for one, hate and I think Hanneman hates as well. I think that was one that just slipped through the fuckin' sifter. Like, whoops, shouldn't have recorded that one. [Laughs]

What is your favorite Slayer record looking back?
Historically Reign in Blood, without a doubt. And I think the new one is the most complete since the late '80s. I like everything we've done this decade, definitely, but I think each one has gotten a little better.

Speaking of, you also have that vinyl box set coming out. How involved in that were you?
More so. We had some artwork to pick from. They had some stupid name for it in the beginning, like—this may not be it but it was equally as dumb—The Vinyl Collection: American Recordings, or something retarded like that. I'm like, "Man, this ain't the fuckin' Eagles. We've gotta have something cool." They kept busting my balls on tour, and I said, "Give me a second. Let me hang out at the bar one night and think about it and I'll come up with something great." And that's what happened. Two days later, I wrote back, The Vinyl Conflict, and everybody loved it. Definitely gives it a Slayer vibe, you know?

Obviously "vinyl" is a play on "final." Do you see an end in sight for Slayer?
I don't know. Not for myself. I feel great. I wouldn't know what else to do. There's four people involved, so everybody's got their own opinion about what the future holds. I don't wanna give false information and say, "Hey, we're gonna play 'til we're 50 years in the business." [Laughs] But I'm gonna be around for a while, regardless of what I do. And if you ever speak to the other dudes, maybe find out. [Laughs]