Slayer's new "War at the Warfield" DVD isn't one of those home-video concert releases meant to distract fans during a lengthy gap between records — the group already has 10 songs written for its next LP, which should be out by April.

Five of the songs have been jammed out by guitarist Kerry King and drummer Dave Lombardo. Guitarist Jeff Hanneman penned two and recorded them with a drum machine. The rest are less developed. The band hopes to finish the tunes before embarking on the Jägermeister Music Tour with Hatebreed on October 10. If all goes according to schedule, Slayer will enter a Los Angeles studio in early December.

"It's gonna sound like a band that starts with the letter 'S' and ends with 'R,' " joked singer/bassist Tom Araya.

"The songs that me and Dave are working on are very traditional, thrashy stuff with breaks that come out of nowhere," King said. "Most of it's really fast. The other day, we started working on a song that had a groovy, almost rock and roll chorus, and it kind of concerned me. Now there's a fast part there."

Hanneman has written some lyrics, but King and Araya have no idea what they're going to say. They only know what they're not going to say. The horrific events of September 11, 2001, and the violence that's erupted in the Middle East seem like natural subjects for a band that's thrived on songs about carnage and human atrocity, but this time Slayer won't be turning to the nightly news for subject matter.

"All that stuff is what everybody else is gonna write about, so I'll avoid it like the plague," King said. "When we wrote 'War Ensemble,' that wasn't about any given conflict. It lets it be timeless. And I think that's more important than writing about individual issues that 15 billion bands are already gonna address."

Although Slayer plan to have the new album written by the first date of the Hatebreed jaunt, they will not be road-testing the songs.

"That just doesn't work," King said. "We tried that around the time we wrote the 1990 album Seasons in the Abyss. We played 'War Ensemble.' And if you play something fast, people think they like it, and they're trying to have a good time, but it's so fast in that environment, you can't tell what's going on. If we had something slow that you could catch, it would probably work, but I don't know if there's gonna be anything that slow."

Fans who can't wait until October to see Slayer live can get a good taste of the bloodletting on the "War at the Warfield" DVD, which hits shelves Tuesday. Recorded at San Francisco's Warfield theater in December 2001, "War" features 19 live songs, the unedited video for "Bloodline" from 2001's God Hates Us All and 50 minutes of interview footage.

"I don't think it's different than any other Slayer show," Araya said. "You got your kids doing the mosh stuff. They get crazy, they tear the place up. And then you get the one kid that's tempted to jump off the balcony. Whether he does it or not is another story. When they do, of course they get hurt, but they always insist on staying so they can watch the rest of the show, then they go to the emergency room.