Dateline: Anaheim

The location is unclear but we feel our way there. Left, right, another left, this time down an industrial drive. We pull into a parking lot of what looks like a long row of dentists' offices. One glass door is taped over with newspaper. . . . That's the one. Inside, it's quiet. The entry room is white, mildly messed up, with coffee cups, meal detritus, and random electrical cords strewn about. The walls host old but still very pink Hustler pinups and the band's own king-size promotional posters from past tours. In an adjacent room sits the band on a couple of black leather couches.

You know the names by now: guitarists Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King, vocalist/bassist Tom Araya, drummer Paul Bostaph. Together they sit around musing on the band's very definite past, and its not-so-assured future. Though they've established themselves with such terrifying classics as the thrash blueprints Reign In Blood and Hell Awaits, many say that the band's best years are behind them. Hell, 15 years is a long time for anyone to stay together, no less a bunch of embittered cranks from a down and out L.A. byway.

But listening to them talk, it's clear that King and crew don't feel that way, that their splattery new album, Diabolus Musica, is more a beginning than an end, more an invigorated start to the next phase of their career than a lame finish. "Yeah, it's a new start for us," says King. "Each fucking time we come out with something we have to prove ourselves." He raises a worn jack boot and drops it on the coffee table. "It's not that we haven't earned any respect, we just don't get any."

Formed sometime in rock's Paleolithic era (1982) in Huntington Beach, California, Slayer has demonstrated an extraordinary longevity. Though they began as aimless marauders with only inspiration and anger as their guides, King, Hanneman, and Araya (Bostaph would join later) have become one of this rock generation's most unique and strident voices-a hairy beast of a band capable of Darwinian survival under any pop music climate. Forget the resurgence of ska and the minor commercialism of poppy punk. Slayer's built to last, baby, fit to freak the competition with decibels, power, and ramrod attitude.

"Shit," says Tom Araya, "one of the reasons we came together was to go against all the glam shit that was going on in Los Angeles."

"It made us sick, all that stuff," says Kerry King, his widely girthed neck wrapped in ghoulish tattoos. "All the punks were saying 'fuck you' to that pussy glam shit."

But weren't the glam bands saying the same to the punks? "If they were," snickers King, "they were sayin' it quietly, 'cause they would've gotten their asses kicked otherwise!"

When King and Hanneman joined forces with Tom Araya in those early days, their band experience was limited. Araya had been playing in a cover band with King's guitar instructor, who referred the bassist to Kerry based on what he saw as mutual musical interests. King, a big Van Halen fan, had been taking lessons for a few years, and was developing a taste for heaviness. His first teacher was a doctor of music theory. "It was definitely worth it to put my time in with teachers," he says. "I didn't know any better at that age. It was just another learning experience for me. I was in school anyway."

Araya had also begun playing in his early teens, though because his brother played guitar, Tom was left with the bass. His first gig came with a Top 40 band, one in which Bad Company was considered heavy. "I did sight reading, and played a lot of songs, but I didn't know heavy music until I got a call from Kerry." Having grown up in the '60s, Araya knew psychedelic and acid rock-Steppenwolf, Robin Trower, and Hendrix. (Today he calls himself the "King of Karaoke.") When he met King, bands like Venom and early Iron Maiden made a lot more sense, given his penchant for political uprising and the like. Araya, a rebel to his soul, never looked back as his classic rock chops metastasized into a fire-breathing vehicle for furious noise.

Hanneman admits that in the early days, he didn't know much, but he was desperate to participate. "With [Kerry and Tom] I had to learn fast or I was out," he remembers. "There was a real incentive that it was better to learn quickly." The blonde-haired guitarist is at least for the moment soft-spoken, laid back to the point of sleep. "I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I just knew it was gonna get me out of a real job for a while."

Fifteen years later, Hanneman and Slayer have successfully avoided "real jobs," opting for a life on the road, employed by millions of fans who've been more than happy to pay them a decent wage, lavish them with fanatical adulation, and loft them up into the rarefied ranks of rock and roll lore.

"In the beginning," Araya recalls, "we just started doing it. I knew it was the only chance we were gonna get, so we had to take advantage." Starting out, a studio owner asked Slayer to make a record before they even had songs, or money. "So we got a studio without money and without songs. 'Ah, we'll pay him tomorrow,' we said. 'Let's get the studio and worry about it later!'" The album to emerge from those sessions, Show No Mercy, sold 60,000 copies and etched Slayer's crucial modus operandi in big slabs of stone. The world heard.

After the record, there was a tour. "We had dates lined up for our first tour," says Araya. "But on the day we were supposed to leave, we had no van and no money." Fortunately, chutzpah and, oh yeah, pot, were in abundance. "We all hitched a U-Haul onto my Camaro, piled in and left. Bye-bye, everybody. . . . What the fuck, you know? Like I said," says Araya, "we just had to do it."

So, yeah, the band's been "doing it"-with all attendant ramifications-since the beginning, when doing it meant doing it or dying, becoming irrelevant. Today, the stakes are equally high, but in a different way. Today, if Slayer doesn't "do it," the deep foundation on which they've built a career remains, and so remains their end-of-the-day satisfaction that what they've done will live on long after they're gone. Then again, not doing it means losing what they've fought for all these years, losing relevance, losing a means to an end. "This is like our first gig again," says Araya. "Right now, every record's important. I still get butterflies when I think about it. We hope it's accepted. We hope it counts, and kids buy it, 'cause then we know we've bought ourselves a little more time on this spree of ours."

Diabolus Musica is a spree, all right, a shooting spree in which songs replace bullets, and are aimed right between the eyes. Tracks like "Love To Hate," "Perversions Of Pain," and "Desire" communicate the kind of sharp-toothed sentiments, political stridency, perverse fantasy, and violent tendencies with which the band has become synonymous.

But Diabolus Musica isn't all sturm und drang. "Love To Hate," for example, is a complex cadre of bits stitched crudely together, featuring some prog-ish dual guitar figures to accompany King's manic soloing, as well as King's sing-shout, hip hop-style vocals. Araya's chugging "Bitter Peace" works in some nasty neo-metal trills. "Unguarded" features a stunning double and triple-tracked lightning solo that reaches into the unlikely and very trebly territory of Queen's Brian May. "Desire" hinges on King's absurd notion of what comprises a solo, something he and his V have made near-classic.