Slayer opened the Latin American leg of its Reign in Blood 40th Anniversary tour at the Palacio de los Deportes in Mexico City on 21 October 2026. It was the band’s first show in Mexico in eight years. Further dates in Colombia, Chile, Argentina and Brazil followed.
The night was built around the 1986 album played in full. Slayer spread nearly two hours of music around it, so Reign in Blood worked as the centrepiece of a career retrospective rather than a short anniversary segment.
Later songs and established staples set up the album’s closing run, which ended with “Angel of Death,” “Postmortem” and “Raining Blood.” The order gave the show a clear arc and covered ground for listeners attached to different periods of the band.
Slayer still plays fast, with interlocking guitars and hard double-kick drumming at serious volume. The material is punishing by design, and the band delivers it straight rather than reshaping it on stage.
The Reign in Blood sequence drew the strongest reaction of the night. Headbanging and moshing ran through the album’s running order, and individual parts mattered less than the force of the whole.
Fire and flares framed the staging, and the crowd stayed locked in to the end. The set finished with long applause, shouting and raised arms across the arena.
Red lighting and large-scale stage imagery carried the production, with the mix pushed to punishing levels. Everything points to a show built to match the music’s confrontational edge.
Power Trip opened, putting a current thrash band in front of the group that helped define the genre’s extremes. The bill offered a generational link, but the night belonged to the headliners and the support slot drew far less attention.
Two things gave the Mexico City date its weight: a landmark album turning forty and a band returning after a long absence. Playing Reign in Blood start to finish lets newer metal fans hear it as an album, not a handful of favourites.
A wider Latin American run followed this show. What the Palacio de los Deportes held on to was simpler: a landmark album played whole, at full volume, to a hall that stayed on its feet to the end.
