Dave Lombardo

Dave Lombardo — born in Havana, Cuba, on 16 February 1965 — is Slayer's founding drummer and one of the most influential instrumentalists in the history of extreme metal. He emigrated with his family to California as a child and formed Slayer with Kerry King in 1981. His technical contribution is foundational: it was he who established the use of double kick at continuous, sustained speed as the rhythmic base of thrash metal, a device that practically did not exist in that form before Reign in Blood (1986). The whole record lasts twenty-nine minutes and is played at a level of intensity no one had tried to hold for that long. But reducing him to speed would be unfair. Lombardo comes from a Latin rhythmic background — he grew up hearing Cuban percussion — and plays with a sense of displacement and polyrhythm rare in the genre: the fills land off the expected place, and the left hand frequently contradicts the foot, creating tension rather than mere propulsion. His relationship with Slayer had three interruptions, the last in 2013, over disputes about contractual terms. Outside the band he built a career remarkably broad for a metal musician: he played in Fantômas, Mike Patton's experimental project, in Grip Inc., Suicidal Tendencies, Testament and the Misfits, besides work in contemporary music and film scoring.