Every band has a creation myth. Mortar's begins in June of 1987, when guitarists Brian T. Foster and Dave Dorocke (my uncle) decided to build something from the ground up in Chicago. They recruited a bassist named Erik and drummer Tim Pollombo, and the four of them got to work quietly, privately, with no audience and no guarantee of one. By the end of that year, they had a demo. It never left their hands. The world didn't hear it. That recording existed only for them, a private document of a band becoming itself, and it stayed that way.
Then Erik left. He'd go on to join Zoetrope, the Chicago thrash band that was already making noise on the broader Midwest scene, a footnote that speaks to the caliber of musicians Mortar were working with from the very beginning. The departure meant a new bassist, a very reshuffled lineup, and a decision: start over or step forward. Mortar stepped forward. Conquering Armies was the result. Released in 1988, it was the first time anyone outside the band's immediate circle heard what Foster and Dorocke had been building. Behind it sat a full year of private work: rehearsals, recordings, the unglamorous labor of becoming a band before anyone was watching. Ahead of it lay years more of development, sharper recordings, a growing catalog that would eventually produce the focused precision of Created and the blunt force of Killing Machine.
Conquering Armies sits at the hinge point of all of it, the moment Mortar decided they were ready, stepped out of the underground rehearsal rooms, and let the world decide. 1988 was thrash metal's year of reckoning. …And Justice for All was weeks away, South of Heaven had just dropped, and the genre was at its commercial peak while being at its creative apex simultaneously, and somewhere in Chicago, a band that had already been quietly sharpening themselves for a year was ready to be heard. Conquering Armies carries that readiness in every track. This isn't a band fumbling their way through a first impression. It's a band that had already done the private work and was now stepping into the light with something to show for it.
The production carries the hallmarks of the era: lo-fi in the way that underground demos were lo-fi, not by choice but by circumstance, with a directness that no amount of studio polish could replicate. It sounds like a band playing in a room together, which is exactly what it is, and that immediacy is its greatest asset. There's no artifice here, no veneer, just four tracks of raw, unfiltered thrash from a group that understood the genre at a fundamental level before most of their regional peers had caught up. The demo opens with "Bullets Are Cheaper," and it announces itself without ceremony. The title carries the blunt political edge that characterized the best thrash writing of the period, not sloganeering, but a kind of hard-eyed realism that the genre wore naturally. The track itself is fast and aggressive, built on a riff architecture that's simple enough to hit hard on first listen and constructed well enough to hold up beyond it. As opening statements go, it's unambiguous: Mortar wasn't here to ease anyone in."War Within Society" follows and expands the thematic territory. Where the opener gestures outward at external conflict, this track turns the lens inward, and the shift gives the demo an early sense of range. The riffing here has more tension in it, a coiled quality that suits the subject matter, and it's the first moment on the recording where you can hear the band thinking beyond the immediate impact of the notes. For a public debut, the willingness to stretch this early is telling. "The Irony of Apocalypse" is the demo's most ambitious track by title and by execution. There's a compositional seriousness to it, a sense that the band is reaching for something beyond the straightforward thrash template and largely getting there. The irony embedded in the title reflects a lyrical intelligence that was always present in the best thrash writing of the era, and Mortar delivers it with conviction. It's the track that hints most clearly at where the band would go across the years of demos and releases that followed, a glimpse of the fuller picture still being assembled.
The title track "Conquering Armies" closes the demo and earns its placement as the centerpiece statement. It's the fullest realization of everything the preceding three tracks have been building toward, a closer that doesn't just end the demo but defines it. The riffing is at its most confident, the arrangement its most deliberate, and the overall effect is of a band that knew exactly what they wanted to say and had found the right words for it by the time they reached the end of the tape. As the track that shares its name with the whole release, it carries that responsibility and delivers. What makes Conquering Armies remarkable in retrospect is the knowledge of what came before and after it. Behind it sat a year of private work, a 1987 demo that never went public practice rounds, refinements, the unglamorous labor of becoming a band, while ahead of it lay years more of development, sharper recordings, and a few more records that would leave a legacy in Chicago's metal history.
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