Written by The following contains major spoilers for Invincible season four, episode four.
Slayer make a characteristically unsubtle appearance in the latest episode of Amazon Prime’s animated superhero series Invincible.
The California thrash metal band’s signature song, 1986’s Raining Blood, soundtracks the climactic sequence of episode four of season four, where protagonist Mark “Invincible” Grayson (voiced by The Walking Dead’s Steven Yeun) joins forces with Satan (The Evil Dead’s Bruce Campbell) to battle the villainous entity Volcanikka and try to stop her from taking over Hell.
Part of the bloody sequence has been uploaded to YouTube by Prime Video Australia. Watch below.
Invincible, which follows teenager Grayson as he attempts to balance saving the world from supernatural and alien threats with navigating the everyday drama of being a teenager, is based on the graphic novel series of the same name by Robert Kirkman (creator of the original Walking Dead comics).
The first season premiered in March 2021 and, after quickly becoming one of Prime’s biggest series, it was renewed for both a second and third season. It was renewed for season four in July 2024, and the first three episodes came out simultaneously on March 18. New episodes are dropping weekly.
Kirkman speaks about the latest Invincible episode, called Hurm, in a new interview with TV Insider. The episode’s storyline is one of the show’s few elements to not have been adapted from the comic.
“I had this Hell storyline that I wanted to do in the comics. And to be honest, it was vague to the point of, ‘I don’t know, superheroes go to Hell in Marvel and DC books all the time. Wouldn’t it be interesting if Invincible went to Hell?’ I really didn’t have much more than that,” he explained.
“And so actually getting in and figuring out the rules of demon society and where Hell was and how it fits in the Invincible universe, and all the mythology around it was super exciting and super interesting.”
Regarding the use of Slayer’s music, he adds: “We wanted to add something that was new and different. When I’m writing episodes, I’m usually adapting my own material, and it’s boring and tedious sometimes. So, I would always kind of daydream, ‘Oh, what if I was doing something new?’
“And so as we got closer and closer to season four, we kind of identified a pocket where we had some room to do something new and interesting and different.”
Raining Blood is far from the first major Invincible needle-drop. The song Tom Tom by Canadian electronic band Holy Fuck has become something of a theme song for the Flaxans, one of the series’ alien antagonists, and Karma Police by Radiohead was prominently played in the first episode of season two.
Slayer released Raining Blood in 1986, when it appeared as the final song of their acclaimed third album, Reign In Blood. Despite not coming out a single, it became one of the thrashers’ defining tracks and has been played at almost every one of their concerts since it came out. The band retired in 2019, but returned in a live-only capacity in 2024.
Slayer have two tour dates on their slate right now, taking place at the US festivals Rocklahoma and Sick New World Texas in September. Guitarist Kerry King announced earlier this week that he plans to enter the studio in April and record his second solo album, the follow-up to 2024’s From Hell I Rise.
