Slayer singer/bassist Tom Araya recently gave a detailed insight regarding the internal band relationships, expressing great disappointment in former drummer Dave Lombardo and calling guitarist Kerry King a business partner only.

During an interview with City Pages, Araya opened up about the Lombardo matter, saying that the drummer's Facebook rant "left him fuming." He explained, "When we were rehearsing, he seemed to do a 180 and said some things that kind of upset me and Kerry.

"Kerry just looked at him and said, 'If you feel that way, then why are we even rehearsing for this tour?' So we wrote him a letter and said, 'Listen, we need to know if you're going to do the shows in Australia. If you're not, we need to do something about that.' We didn't get a reply."

While chatting with Brave Words, Tom shared a similar stance, saying that he expected the older issues with Dave to reoccur despite the band doing everything in its power to reach out to him. "Dave did what he did; I tried to be his friend. We all tried to be his friend," Tom concluded. When it comes to his relationship with Kerry King, Araya admitted it comes down to business only, but includes mutual respect nevertheless.

"Out of the four individual members of the band, I think me and Jeff were the tightest," he said. "We were the closest. My relationship with Kerry ... it was never a really close relationship. As the years went on, it never solidified. We are in a band together and at this point we are business partners. And we can respect each other along those lines. Yeah, we communicate, we talk and we get along.

"We don't share closeness," he continued. "Although what has happened recently with Jeff, it has brought us closer together, because it's just the two of us now. At one point it could have been Dave as well, but Dave changed that completely."

During a separate Rolling Stone interview, King brought up an interesting matter not quite discussed before - the idea of Slayer performing Exodus tunes. The band basically got the ball rolling on one of the recent shows as they actually played an Exodus tune, but Kerry now seems quite keen on giving one of the Gary Holt tracks a permanent spot on the group's setlist.

"Yeah, we've done that song twice," he explained. "Rather than take any of our songs out, we just added it in. It's an old-school song, and Gary and Paul were both in Exodus. It's the same era, same great music. I love playing that song. I think it's going to be part of the tour."

Finally, the guitarist pointed out that he had a feeling that after the spider bite, Jeff wasn't coming back to the band. "To be honest, I knew that after the spider bite that he probably wasn't going to come back," King said. "The door was open for him to come back. If he worked hard enough and was able to do it, I kind of expected for him to come back. But a month before he passed, he was back in the hospital, and I was pretty sure that he wasn't coming back. But I wasn't thinking that he wouldn't be with us at all."