NEW YORK (AFP) - Slayer, whose occult-infused music helped create the genre of thrash metal, on Tuesday announced that it was retiring after a final tour.

The band, whose founding member and key songwriter Jeff Hanneman died in 2013, said it was retiring after nearly 37 years of making "the most brutal, breathtakingly aggressive, all-hell's-a-breaking-loose music ever created".

The group would start its farewell tour on May 10 in San Diego, playing across the United States and Canada before a final date on June 20 in Austin, Texas.

Emerging in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, Slayer wrote ferocious metal songs driven by minor keys, intense bursts of speed and gloomy guitar riffs.

The band frequently raised controversy and faced allegations of Nazi sympathies, which the members denied, for its song Angel Of Death about human experiments in a concentration camp.

It also came under fire for its 2006 song Jihad, which related the Sept 11 attacks from the viewpoint of the Al-Qaeda assailants.

Slayer released its 12th and apparently final album in 2015.

It was its first without guitarist Hanneman, who died from a flesh-eating bacteria after he was bitten by a spider while taking a bath.