Bandcamp Randy Burns mixed tracks two through seven of Maximum Clonage. If that name means nothing to you, he is the engineer behind Peace Sells… but Who’s Buying? and Death’s Leprosy, which is to say he built a good part of the sound this band is reaching for. Maidenhead have no label. They are eight tracks and thirty minutes long, formed in 2013, based between Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and they went and got him anyway.
They did not stop there. Chris Poland plays the guest solo on “Kill Or Be Killed” and Glen Drover takes the one on “False Masked Hero”, which is two former Megadeth guitarists on one independent record. Rich Gray of Annihilator plays session bass across the same six tracks Burns mixed. For a band at this level that guest list is either a coup or a liability, because a record that leans on borrowed authority has to be good enough to carry the weight.
Here is the interesting part: you can hear where Burns worked. Tracks two through seven are dense and extremely loud, and they are still legible. The rhythm guitars are tightly gated so the staccato riffs keep percussive separation instead of smearing, the frequency picture stays organised, and at full density you can still follow what the guitars are doing. That is the hard trick in modern thrash, and it is done well.
Then compare the closer. “Hasta La Proxima” opens on a genuinely spacious clean guitar passage, then drops into the heavy section at twenty-two seconds, and the difference is immediate: the cymbals and the layered guitars pile into the same upper middle, the drums lose ground underneath, and the whole thing turns noisy in a way nothing in the middle of the album does. The opener is a different case again, a short instrumental whose drums read as machine-built rather than played, a hard clicked kick over a dry snap, closer to industrial assembly than to anything the band plays afterwards. The two tracks that bookend the album are the two Burns did not touch, and that is not a coincidence you have to strain to hear.
What holds across all eight is the mastering, and it is the album’s real cost. Everything is run into the limiter, and the macro dynamics go with it: the heaviest passages are not meaningfully heavier than the merely heavy ones, because there is no headroom left for them to be. The bass has the same problem throughout, locked to the kick as a sub-frequency floor rather than an instrument with a midrange voice of its own, so on the fastest tracks the low end pushes without articulating.
The writing deserves more credit than the guest list implies. “Death March” is about soldiers following orders into slaughter, with the propaganda machine named as the culprit rather than the enemy. “Maximum Clonage” is disposable-clone dystopia. “False Masked Hero” is a straightforward accusation aimed at a manipulator. It is fiction and horror framing throughout, and the stance underneath it is consistently anti-authoritarian: people fighting systems built to use them up.
Thirty minutes, no filler, and a band that clearly knows which records it wants to stand next to. The next one needs somebody willing to leave the master alone, and the two tracks at the ends handed to the same person who did the middle.
The guitar sound is the most carefully handled element here: high gain, tightly gated, and cut so that fast alternate picking keeps its edges rather than turning into a single tone. That gating is what carries the album, because the arrangements are busy and the tempos rarely let up. The kick is clicked hard for cut-through, the snare is dry and close, and the cymbals stay just short of sibilant on most tracks. Sub-bass content is substantial but tied to the kick pattern rather than moving independently, so the low end pushes as one block. Stereo placement is wide on the rhythm guitars and centred on everything else, which keeps the picture readable at high density. The one genuinely open moment on the record is the clean guitar passage that opens the closer, spacious and dynamic, before the density arrives at twenty-two seconds.
Standout tracks: Death March, False Masked Hero, Maximum Clonage
