Editing Plasmatics (section)

=== ''Maggots: The Record'' (1987–1988) ===
Beech had rejoined the band to both tour and play on the next album where the re-formed four-piece band became a centerpiece for perhaps the most complex arrangements in the band's career. After the archetypal minimalism, both lyrically and musically of ''Kommander'', the new album, which would again carry the Plasmatics name, was filled with complexity and returned to the social and political themes previously found most strongly in ''Coup'' but also in ''1984'' before it: environmental decay and a world where excess and abuse led directly to a doomsday scenario.

''[[Maggots: The Record]]'' was recorded in 1987 and set 25 years in a future where environmental abuse and the burning of fossil fuels have created a [[greenhouse effect]] leading to an end of the world scenario. Called by many the first "thrash metal opera", the central theme of the album is an end of the world scenario that follows from genetic engineering and global warming, something that was not at all part of the general public awareness of the time. A group of scientists trying to eliminate pollution in the rivers and oceans develop an RNA retrovirus designed to eat it all up and then die once the pollution has been consumed. But global warming leading to the flooding of land areas instead puts the virus in contact with the "common maggot" leading to a mutated form of maggot that doubles in size with each generation looking for more and more things to consume. In the "end of the world" finale, cities are being destroyed and humans consumed by giant maggots a horrific metaphorical end to a world blind to human consumption and environmental destruction.

The album features various scenes of The White Family over the course of three days. The family is devoured while watching a TV game show. Valerie, the girlfriend of hot-shot television reporter Bruce is devoured by three massive maggots while lying in her boyfriend's bed. The final scene has Cindy White trying to fight off the attacking maggots and running out onto a fire escape where she sees the crowded streets below as the record shows the entire human population is headed for imminent annihilation. The album was on the WOW label; distributed by [[Profile Records]] in the U.S. and overseas by [[GWR Records]], which had been started by [[Motörhead]]'s longtime manager Doug Smith.

Williams did a performance piece to inaugurate the album at New York City's [[Palladium (New York City)|Palladium]], which had been transformed from a proscenium theater into a huge multi-level club where she sledgehammered and chainsawed to smithereens a facsimile all-American living room. "Maggots: The Tour" began a week later using the Plasmatics name for the first time in two albums with slogans such as "Those Now Eating Will Soon Be Eaten," "The Day of the Humans is Gone," and lyrics such as "soldiers for the DNA dissidents are put away, dragged off in the dead of night, disappear without a sight". Rear screen projectors ran film of human disasters, fascists and other historical horrors, environmental carnage and human rights violations on huge screens behind the band during all the songs from the ''Maggots'' album.

A review in ''Kerrang!'' came out shortly thereafter: A 5 out of 5 Ks, "Quite simply a masterpiece... a work of genius." Williams' vocal work "reduces Celtic Frost's Tom G. Warrior's 'death grunts' to mere whimpers" it went on coupled with "a mixture of hedonistic operatic melodies..gut forged to some of the heaviest armadillo beats you're ever like to hear committed to vinyl."