Angel of Death

Reign in Blood is the most efficient thirty minutes in heavy metal history. Released on Rick Rubin's Def Jam label in 1986 — a pairing that seemed absurd and turned out to be visionary — the record was faster, tighter, and more deliberately shocking than anything the genre had produced before it.

Angel of Death opens the album and announces that something unprecedented is happening: Tom Araya's scream, Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman's interlocking guitar assault, Dave Lombardo's drumming at a tempo that remained a benchmark for years. The subject matter — Josef Mengele — was designed to provoke, and it did.

Reign in Blood effectively ended one era of metal and began another. Its influence on death metal, black metal, and extreme music broadly is total. The album is 28 minutes long and impossible to improve upon.