Parenting & Family Quote by Dave Lombardo

There’s a quiet whiplash in Lombardo’s phrasing: childhood, teenage years, then suddenly Slayer at 17, like a hard cut in a film from the suburbs to the battlefield. The line isn’t braggy; it’s a musician clocking how unnatural that acceleration was. “Strange period” does a lot of work, smoothing over what could be said louder: that adolescence got swallowed by a project that would help define an entire genre’s intensity.

The subtext is about timing as destiny. Forming Slayer “not out of high school” isn’t just a biographical detail; it’s a pressure point. It frames the band’s origin story as less calculated career move and more adolescent momentum - the kind that comes from boredom, hunger, and proximity to friends with the same volume turned up inside their heads. In metal, authenticity is currency, and Lombardo’s specificity reads like proof: this wasn’t a brand strategy; it was teenage life mutating into something bigger than anyone could manage.

Context matters because early-’80s thrash wasn’t a polished industry lane. It was kids inventing a language in real time, with limited resources and maximal conviction. Lombardo’s retrospective tone hints at the cost: if you skip the normal rites of passage, you don’t just gain a head start - you trade away a version of youth that can’t be replayed. The sentence lands because it holds both truths at once: the awe of having been there early, and the disorientation of growing up too fast under the blast radius of your own ambition.