A longtime Board Member and repeat guest, Gavin Reid, wandered over from the 90s Dig Me Out feed to the 80s Metal spin‑off with a simple mission: bring an Australian thrash record almost nobody in the States heard in real time, but that absolutely would’ve been on a denim jacket in 1987 if geography and distribution had cooperated. Gavin calls himself a “metal virgin” on this feed, but he’s the one who shows up with a Mortal Sin battle-jacket patch story, tape‑trading lore, and firsthand intel from ex–Candy Harlots bassist Lino, who actually rehearsed with the band in their earliest days.
An Australian leap into mayhem
Mortal Sin came together in Sydney in 1985, with bassist Andy (the lone constant member) and vocalist Matt Maurer at the core, cycling through guitarists and drummers in classic revolving‑door metal fashion. The real spark was drummer Wayne Campbell, who was tape‑trading with U.S. fans in 1984, scored an early Metallica tape, and promptly quit his previous band Wizard mid‑rehearsal when they tried to write a power ballad, choosing speed and heaviness over radio bait.
Within seven months of forming, the band pooled their cash, booked time at 301 Studios in Sydney—a room that had hosted everyone from Prince to Duran Duran—and cut Mayhemic Destruction themselves, releasing it under their own Mega Metal imprint. They treated it like a fanzine, mailing copies everywhere until a copy landed in James Hetfield’s hands, earning them an endorsement and a quick jump from local heroes to a band sharing stages with Metallica, Megadeth, and Testament.
The wider story is messy in a very metal way: multiple breakups and reunions from 1985 through the 2010s, a discography that runs from this DIY debut through Vertigo and Virgin releases and back to self‑released records, and only their second album, Face of Despair, ever getting an official U.S. release. There’s also a genuinely haunting detail—original drummer Wayne has been listed as missing since 2022 and is presumed dead, adding a real‑world Richey Edwards‑style mystery to the band’s history.
How Mayhemic Destruction hits your ears
Sonically, Mayhemic Destruction doesn’t play by the standard 80s thrash rulebook. Instead of the expected guitar‑forward, clicky‑kick, buried‑bass mix you hear on a lot of American records, this album shoves the drums and low end to the front, with huge, Bonham‑like kicks and bass runs that occasionally muscle their way into the spotlight.
Once you adjust to that inverted mix, the guitar work starts revealing all kinds of DNA beyond “Metallica but Australian.” “The Curse” rides picked harmonics and dissonant second‑guitar figures that don’t feel like stock thrash; “Women in Leather” veers into Maiden‑ish territory with its break section; “Blood, Death, Hatred” brings in a Motörhead‑style groove; and “Lebanon” moves on those dark, pseudo‑Middle‑Eastern scales that immediately recall Slayer’s “South of Heaven” and George Lynch’s “Mr. Scary.”
Structurally, the record is tight and purposeful. Most tracks land in the three‑to‑four‑minute range, and the band cram in fast riff changes, half‑time flips, and double‑kick bursts without wandering into prog sprawl or “look what we can play” indulgence. There’s almost zero concession to the 80s “one slow track per thrash album” trend—beyond the teasing clean intro to “Liar,” it’s essentially 35 minutes of relentless riffing and tempo shifts.
The title track at the end is where the band gets genuinely ahead of the curve. “Mayhemic Destruction” drops a proto‑death‑metal vocal and blast‑beat passages a year before Death’s Scream Bloody Gore, leaning into that Cookie Monster growl in a way that would’ve been completely alien to most metal fans in 1986. Sequencing it as the closer feels strategic: the band uses the more familiar thrash/NWOBHM hybrid up front, then sneaks in a glimpse of an uglier, heavier future at the tail end.
The honest flaws
For all the love the riffs and rhythm section earn, the record’s weak point is clear: the vocals. Matt Maurer leans on a Hetfield‑ish bark that works fine as raw attitude, but he rarely steps outside that lane, and there aren’t many vocal hooks that stick once the last cymbal hit fades. There are flashes—like the big high note after the solo in “Mortal Slaughter” or the quieter verse at the start of “Liar”—that hint at more range, but they’re exceptions rather than the rule.
Production choices make that gap more obvious. On tracks like “Women in Leather,” the vocal is so buried that you could swap in almost any lyric and no one would notice, while mid‑album cuts like “Liar,” “Blood, Death, Hatred,” “Mortal Slaughter,” and “Into the Fire” suddenly present a clearer, more balanced vocal mix. It creates the strange sensation that the back half of the record is actually a better intro to the band than the way the songs are sequenced.
That feeds into a bigger structural question: is the tracklist backward? Opening a debut album with a two‑and‑a‑half‑minute instrumental and then another long double‑intro before the first vocal line is bold, but it also delays the moment when a casual listener gets a sense of the band’s personality. There’s a strong argument for starting with something like “Mortal Slaughter” or “Blood, Death, Hatred”—songs that deliver immediately recognizable thrash signals—then bringing in “The Curse” as a mid‑record highlight and saving the instrumental for an outro.
The live tracks on the 20th anniversary edition offer a kind of alternate universe. On stage, the band sounds more like a typical thrash act—guitar‑forward, thinner drums, louder vocals—and while that confirms how tight and energetic they were live, it also strips away some of the studio album’s weird charm. In other words, the same raw, slightly “wrong” mix that makes Mayhemic Destruction frustrating at times is exactly what helps it stand out in 2026.
Where this sits in the metal family tree
Context is everything with a record like this. In mid‑80s Australia, heavy music was still largely rooted in bands like Buffalo and pub‑rock outfits with Sabbath, Maiden, and Motörhead baked into their DNA; Mayhemic Destruction pushes that lineage into a faster, more aggressive zone at a moment when “thrash” as a global language hasn’t fully congealed yet.
Listening now, it plays like a midpoint between several strands. There’s the obvious early‑Metallica influence in the riffing and vocal approach, hints of Slayer in the darker modal choices, Maiden and NWOBHM in the harmonized leads and break sections, and a streak of raw, bluesy Motörhead grit running underneath. With the title track nodding toward death metal before most of the world had a name for it, the record ends up less a clone of any one band and more a snapshot of metal’s evolutionary fork in 1986.
It’s also a reminder of how geography shapes myth. If Mortal Sin had been from New York or the Bay Area instead of Sydney, there’s a good chance Mayhemic Destruction would be a minor cult touchstone in the same breath as early Testament or Exodus—a record you borrow on cassette, dub for a friend, and then see pop up in “100 Greatest Thrash Albums” lists decades later. Instead, it became the kind of album you maybe glimpsed in a magazine ad, forgot, and are only now realizing you missed while you were wearing out your Master of Puppets tape on the school bus.
As it stands, Mayhemic Destruction is a flawed but compelling document: a raw, drum‑heavy, occasionally forward‑thinking debut from a band who would keep mutating as they chased different scenes and sounds. The riffs hit, the rhythm section feels like it’s trying to kick through the speakers, the vocals lag behind, and somewhere in that friction is exactly the kind of imperfect, regional metal artifact that makes digging through 80s obscurities so addictive.
Songs in this Episode
Intro - Women in Leather
19:34 - Blood, Death, Hatred
24:14 - Lebanon 31:38 - Liar
36:06 - Mayhemic Destruction
Outro - The Curse
