THE word iconic is an overused adjective that gets applied to anything remotely well known. It is, however, a genuinely fitting epithet for Mortal Sin, the first Australian thrash metal band to really break out on the international scene.
This year the band has been celebrating the fortieth anniversary with a comeback that began as two shows and quickly grew into overseas touring and the re-release on vinyl of their debut album, Mayhemic Destruction. Now they’re touring Australia once again in tandem with Phoenix, Arizona’s own thrash legends Flotsam and Jetsam.
Barely recovered from jetlag after landing back home from Europe, vocalist and founder Mat Maurer told us about the busy year they’ve had and hinted at things to come.
HOT METAL: It must have been a blast for you to take the band back to Europe once again. You’ve got the band back together a couple of times in the past, but you’ve never really had the time to do it properly.
MAT MAURER: “It’s weird. We didn’t know what to expect when we said we’d do something for the 40th anniversary. We just said, let’s see what happens. We were just going to do those two shows, Sydney and Melbourne, and it just snowballed! Everyone wanted us to play. People are still saying, You haven’t done Wollongong yet! You haven’t done this place. When? When are we going to do it mate? So yes, it’s been pretty crazy here. Way better than we could have ever imagined. We get to play places we haven’t been before. Who would have thought, after 40 years, we’d be going to China!”
HM: 40 years ago you wouldn’t have been able to play there.
MM: “Exactly!”
HM: It’s great that you were able to have the opportunity to do that, and also to reconnect with a lot of fans, too. It struck me when I saw you at the Froth and Fury Festival that there was a lot of people who were seeing you for the first time, totally connected with the fact that they knew who you were and what the relevance of your band was, even though you hadn’t been around for most if not all their lives!
MM: “Yeah, that’s pretty much what blew us away. Like I said, we didn’t know what to expect. And that first one in Adelaide, that set the tone, I guess. I kind of validated that we’d made the right decision. It gave us a lot of hope. It gave us goosebumps. Fuck! People didn’t forget about us!”
HM: When I saw you again in Sydney, even you were blown away by the crowd. I haven’t seen a crowd like that for a Sydney metal band since probably back when you were playing in the eighties sometime.
MM: “Again, that was weird to us. You can only hope for that sort of stuff, then when you get there… the whole vibe of the room was so electric. It was exciting from the moment the doors opened, when we did sound check… There was a good set of bands on that bill. That was important, as well. We said, let’s put on an event. Not just a show. Let’s make every show an event. A really good line-up. Pay extra to have really good bands on the bill, and that way people know they’ll get value for money. So they walk away from it knowing they had a good time and they enjoy it.”
HM: I think you succeeded in that regard, and now we’re going to get to see you again. With Flotsam and Jetsam too. It’s going to be a real meeting of thrash minds.
MM: “It’s kind of why we called it Monsters of Thrash. When you want to come up with a title, there’s Clash of the Titans and all that cliched stuff. We’ve got the monster from Mayhemic Destruction, Morty. They’ve got a monster. Let’s call it Monsters of Thrash! It’s going to be a great show. We’re really looking forward to it, as well. When we look at that sort of thing, you want to test yourself. How will we sit with Flotsam? Will they blow us off stage, or will we match them? That’s the kind of thing we think of. We played with Kings of Thrash in Oslo, and afterwards Dave Ellefson said, ‘You guys sounded great!’ So you don’t know where you stand with these sort of bands. Hopefully we can match them, and put on a really good show. We just want play to walk away knowing they’ve seen a good show and talk about it afterwards.”
HM: What are your plans for after these shows? Are you going to continue? You’ve been doing this now for almost a whole year now.
MM: “Yeah I know! We’ve hardly had a chance to sit down and talk about what we want to do next. We’ve had offers to do some festivals next year. Some quite big ones. Off the back of those, we missed out on Wacken festival this year so we’re hoping we’ve got a good chance next year. They’ll definitely be a European tour, and we’ve kind of discussed that, if the Flotsam thing goes really well, let’s bring another band. Let’s bring Forbidden or Sacred Reich or Metal Church. We played on a festival with Suicidal Angels and said, Have you guys even been to Australia? If we do really well with Flotsam – we put the money up for the tour. We’ve not gone through a promoter. We’ve put this on ourselves as a thank you for all the support the fans have given us this year. We wanted to thank them by bringing someone special out. Flotsam have never been here, so let’s make something of it. Let them see that the thrash scene in AUstralia is quite big and they can say “You’ve got to go to Australia! It’s really good over there.” That’s what we’re hoping for.”
HM: I know America never really opened its arms up to you. Is there a chance you could play there?
MM: “We’ve had several offers to go, but with the way things have been… a lot of bands have been getting visas knocked back. You don’t want a promoter to have to go through that. ‘We’ll bring Mortal Sin on a tour and pay for airfares’, and then some dickhead says ‘No, we won’t give you visas’. So we said, ‘Let’s wait until things hopefully cool down a bit’. We got asked twice to play on Hell’s Heroes, we got asked to play at a festival in Atlanta, and he was going to get us five or six shows on the east coast. We had someone who offered us to play one show in Los Angeles! We’ve had quite a few offers and it’s hard to turn things down, but at the time Trump was saying Australia this, Australia that. We just want to wait until it’s cooled down a bit. I know King Parrot have been over there, Ne Obliviscaris have been there in the past year. Maybe we should have said Yes, but in saying that, we’ve had so much going on this year, where would we have fit it anyway?”
HM: It seems like you had a pretty good time overseas and managed to bring back some of that Mortal Sin magic to people.
MM: “Yeah. When we decided to do something, the first thing we said was we can’t be back and be mediocre. We have to do something really special. We have to be amazing. We have to be the best we’ve ever been, because we don’t want people coming to show and going, ‘Yeah, they were all right. They’re past their time.’ What we’ve been getting is, ‘How can you guys still be so good after 40 years?’ People ask me, ‘How come you’re still singing so good?’ Is there any reason why I shouldn’t?”
HM: You’ve still got basically the same line-up you had fifteen years ago when you did Psychology of Death. Those guys are guns.
MM: “It was pretty important to keep some kind of consistency. When we asked Luke (Cook) if he wanted to be a part of it, and he said No, we were like, Well now we have to find a drummer. And drummers are hard to come by. It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Getting George involved was a masterstroke. He’s well revered, he’s such a powerful drummer. He added another level to us, a good energy and a good vibe. I think that’s helped lift us up another level, as well.”
HM: He’s a young guy and he’s always playing.
MM: “He lives to play! You can tell that when he does play. He injured his arm just before we went over, doing some weights. He played that whole tour with a pulled muscle in his arm! Full credit to him. He pulled through and everyone said he was awesome.”
HM: Speaking of Psychology of Death, that’s still one of my favourite Mortal Sin records.
MM: “It’s a good album. I was saying in one of the other interviews that it’s passed the test of time. Now fifteen years later, people talk about it more now than when we released it. Obviously we released it and then that one tour, and then we stopped. We didn’t really get time to play the songs. We’ve got a good catalogue and it’s quite an honour to represent those songs, because Australia owns those songs. The Australian metal scene owns them. We wrote them, but they own them! It’s an honour for us to go out and play those songs, because they are the anthem of their lives, some of those songs. ‘I am Immortal’ is everyone’s life story! Whenever people talk to us, they say, ‘The first time I heard ‘I am Immortal’ was just amazing!’ We’ve been given that flame to hold high again. We’re holding the torch for the Australian thrash metal scene and people are still cheering for us.”
MONSTERS OF THRASH 2026 featuring Mortal Sin and Flotsam and Jetsam with Hidden Intent and Live Wire
SEPTEMBER 30: Crowbar, Brisbane
OCTOBER 1: Lion Arts Factory, Adelaide
OCTOBER 2: Max Watts, Melbourne
OCTOBER 3: Crowbar, Sydney
