Postmortem

"Postmortem" earns its place as the lesser-known sibling of "Raining Blood" — they appear back-to-back on Reign in Blood and the pairing is deliberate architecture. This song does the groundwork: it establishes a slower, heavier foundation and lets the dread accumulate before the famous explosion that follows it on the album. The opening riff has a lumbering quality, almost doom-adjacent for Slayer, which makes the velocity when it arrives feel earned rather than assumed. Hanneman's guitar work here has a melodic bent that Slayer don't always indulge — there are moments where the leads stretch out into something almost plaintive before being consumed by the surrounding aggression. Araya describes crime scene geography and forensic aftermath in clipped, declarative language that functions more like testimony than narrative. The production on Reign in Blood, Rick Rubin stripping everything back to bone, serves this track's purpose exactly: there is no padding, no reverb halo softening the impact. Every hit is immediate. The song exists in the tradition of extreme metal that understands its job is not to entertain in a conventional sense but to create a specific physical and psychological state in the listener. It is transitional music in the album context — a pressure chamber before the release — and that structural intelligence rewards listeners who engage with Reign in Blood as a complete work rather than a song collection.