Jeff Hanneman

Jeff Hanneman in 2010. He wrote Slayer's best-known song, Angel of Death. 

Thrash metal, the uncompromising subgenre of heavy metal which focuses primarily on speed and aggression, was given huge publicity in the 1980s by the California foursome Slayer, whose guitarist Jeff Hanneman has died of liver failure aged 49. Alongside his bandmates, Tom Araya (vocals and bass), Kerry King (guitar) and Dave Lombardo (drums), Hanneman was a striking live performer, delivering his guitar solos in an instantly recognisable wailing and atonal style.

Born in Oakland, California, Hanneman was raised in a military household. His father had fought in France in the second world war and his brothers served in Vietnam. After acquiring some Nazi memorabilia from his father, Hanneman began to collect Third Reich souvenirs and continued to do so into adulthood.

Hanneman became a huge fan of hardcore punk music, bringing the speed and ferocity of that movement to Slayer when the group formed in 1981. Their first album, Show No Mercy, was released in 1983. Hanneman flirted briefly with a rock'n'roll lifestyle, as he later recalled: "I used to take a lot of pills – uppers, speed – before I joined the band, and then when we were making the first few albums I used to do coke. But one day we just quit. Tom and I were driving to my girlfriend's parents' house, and I was sticking coke up his nose while he was driving, and I suddenly thought, 'What the hell am I doing?' We both looked at each other and we said, 'No more!' So I just drink alcohol now."

By the late 1980s, Slayer had become one of the "big four" of thrash metal bands, alongside Metallica, Megadeth and Anthrax, thanks in part to a record deal with the label Def Jam. The label's owner, Rick Rubin, produced a series of Slayer albums, beginning with their benchmark 1986 release Reign in Blood. Rubin's crisp, reverb-free production perfectly suited the songs' hypnotically fast tempos, lending them a clarity that had been missing from Slayer's previous releases on the independent label Metal Blade.

Reign in Blood opened with what became the band's best-known song,Angel of Death, which was written by Hanneman and concerns the Nazi scientist Josef Mengele's experiments on concentration camp prisoners during the second world war. Hanneman subsequently spent years dismissing allegations of antisemitism.

Despite the extreme nature of some of his songwriting, Hanneman was not an outgoing person by nature, preferring to leave press interviews to other members of the band. When Slayer were off the road, he and his wife, Kathy, whom he married in 1997, entered their dogs in shows as a hobby.

Hanneman's songwriting remained strong throughout the rest of Slayer's career. Evidence of his creative range came with Spill the Blood, a slow, doom-laden song from the 1988 album South of Heaven, and the monstrously speedy Psychopathy Red from World Painted Blood (2009). However, he experienced the occasional dip in quality, notably with the 1998 album Diabolus in Musica. While the album was as musically heavy and lyrically dark as any of Slayer's previous releases, some of its songs entered the downtuned, groove-based style of the then popular nu-metal sound. Fans reacted negatively, and Hanneman later commented: "We do what we do in the moment. Sometimes our albums turn out godlike, and sometimes they turn out lame." Slayer had their biggest chart hit in the US with the 2006 album Christ Illusion, which reached No 5 and featured the Grammy award-winning single Eyes of the Insane, with music composed by Hanneman.

In February 2011 Hanneman was forced to take a temporary leave of absence from Slayer after contracting necrotising fasciitis as a result of being being bitten by a spider in a hot tub. He underwent surgery and required skin grafts. Apart from a guest appearance at a Slayer show in April 2011 in Indio, California, where he played with the sleeve removed from his shirt to reveal the scarring from his surgery, Hanneman spent the next two years out of the public eye.

His wife survives him, along with his brothers, Michael and Larry, and his sister, Kathy.

• Jeff Hanneman, guitar player, born 31 January 1964; died 2 May 2013