Kerry King’s friends say they like his debut solo album better than any single record he’s done in his career

Kerry King, the guitarist for Slayer, has published the third in a series of interview films to promote his debut solo album, “From Hell I Rise”. When asked about the response of “From Hell I Rise” thus far, Kerry stated:

I’ve heard from not only friends, journalists, people I’m doing interviews with that they like this better as a whole than any single record I’ve done in my career. It’s hard for me to say that, because I’ve been a part of all that stuff. But good friends are really fired up about this record that wouldn’t blow sunshine up my ass. And journalists I’ve known for a long, long time, but we’re not just acquaintances; they’re friends of mine that I don’t get to see because of the pandemic. And now things are getting fired up. I’m gonna see all my journalist friends again. But people are talking this record up really big. And they’ve all heard the whole thing, of course, ’cause they’re doing interviews about it, so they have backup to their story. But I’ve heard people are really stoked about this record. I like this record a lot. I like ‘Repentless’ a lot. But I think the performance of everybody is better on this one.

He spoke about the decision to name his project Kerry King:

Well, first and foremost, it was never supposed to bear my name. [Laughs] It just kind of fell into place. We worked for months, we worked for years trying to come up with a fucking name that worked that wasn’t taken, wasn’t used by some other company that made a trademark, a conflict of interest. And it was time for some of our first shows to be announced and we had to roll with something. So we had this logo. Somebody said, just call it Kerry King. Everybody knows who you are, everybody knows what you’re about. That being said, the pressure didn’t really hit because everything was done and recorded before we ever got to Kerry King. It was an afterthought, and we had nowhere to go. And everybody loved the logo, so, you know — insert my name.

And his bandmates as well:

I’ve already had questions about somebody asking me, ‘Is this gonna be a touring band for this album, and then the next album you put another band together?’ which I thought was the oddest question I’ve been asked in a long time. And I’m, like, ‘No, I want this to be a band from day one. I want it to be a band.’ We’re allnabout the same age and hopefully we all decide when time is to retire that we all agree on it. So, we can stick together for three records, four records, five records. Depends how fast we put stuff together, depends how fast touring cycles go. But my intention is for this to be the band from now until the day this band’s done.