Slayer, Testament and Carcass To Tour U.S. In Spring 2016

Slayer will be returning to the United States for the first time since their rocky outing on this summer’s Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival but they are stacking the lineup with direct support from Testament and Carcass as openers, which is a blockbuster trio.

Blabbermouth reported on a leaked date, March 3 at The Fillmore in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but no ticket information is yet available. We here at Metal Injection have heard rumblings of a tour featuring the three, but we were not able to confirm if it was a lock at the time. It seems as though things are official. I imagine the tour will be announced early next week.

SLAYER‘s new album, “Repentless”, was released on September 11 via Nuclear Blast. The follow-up to 2009’s critically acclaimed, Grammy-nominated “World Painted Blood” was produced by Terry Date, who has previously worked with PANTERA, DEFTONES and SOUNDGARDEN. The artwork was created by Brazilian artist Marcelo Vasco in collaboration with the band’s Tom Araya and Kerry King.

A new TESTAMENT studio album is currently being written for a tentative early 2016 release. The band’s guitarist Eric Peterson recently told Lithium Magazine about the progress of the songwriting sessions for TESTAMENT‘s follow-up to 2012’s “Dark Roots Of Earth”: “We’re on our eleventh record, and we’re into this, like, 25, 30 years now. It’s kind of, like, there’s so many bands doing what we do, our style of music, and, I think, a band like us, when you’ve been around this long, you don’t wanna just put out the same thing; you don’t wanna do the cookie-cutter kind of thing, where you’re just, like, ‘Let’s just copy what we did before.’ For me, it’s gotta come from the heart. So that’s why it’s taking so long. I think everybody will be stoked when it comes out.”

CARCASS released a special edition version of its latest album, “Surgical Steel”, on CD and digitally on October 30, and on vinyl on November 20 via Nuclear Blast. The “Complete Edition” includes the whole album “Surgical Steel”, along with the entire “Surgical Remission / Surplus Steel” EP. All the songs were recorded during the “Surgical Steel” sessions, which were helmed by producer Colin Richardson (NAPALM DEATH, BOLT THROWER, GOREFEST, CANNIBAL CORPSE, SINISTER, RODRIGO Y GABRIELA) and mixed/mastered by Andy Sneap (MEGADETH, ACCEPT, EXODUS, TESTAMENT).

“Surgical Steel” sold around 8,500 copies in the United States in its first week of release to debut at position No. 41 on The Billboard 200 chart.

We’ll keep you posted as soon as we get more dates.