HISS have been sitting with failure for a while. Not failure as drama, and not as some abstract theme to pin on a heavy record, but as a working condition: systems that stop responding, language that quits halfway through, bodies that keep getting asked to function after the point where any of it makes sense.
That is the thread running through “Everything is just for one last broken circuit“, the first single from the Uberlândia, Minas Gerais post-hardcore/screamo band’s new EP, “This Exhaustion is Not Ours!“, out today!
The band came together in 2024 when Herison Borges, on guitar and vocals, and Leonardo Mendes, on bass, started playing together again after nearly a decade. Before H.ISS, the two had a similar project around nine or ten years earlier called Eu, Sozinho. The connection is obvious in one sense — the same two people are still here — but Mendes says age, other bands, and a clearer sense of limits changed the terms completely.
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“The direct line between ‘Eu, Sozinho’ and ‘HISS’ with a colder look are the two remaining members, but there’s also a lot of the environment we’ve lived in these last few years,” he says. “We’ve gotten older and more tired, but with that we’ve also had many other experiences with other projects that, for sure, helped us have a more prepared vision for what and how to compose, how to record, how to produce a visual identity, and how to launch a project. Before, chasing the band was, let’s say, the first or second priority in each of our lives. Today, we already know what we’re willing to put into a project, talking about time, effort, and money, that, in the end, makes a project much easier to understand and honest.”
After a year spent experimenting, writing, and tightening the band up, H.ISS brought in Michel Fagner on drums and released their first record, “… And Everything Is Falling Again“. It was well received, and not long after that João Felipe joined as a second guitarist. With the four-piece in place, H.ISS started playing in different cities across Brazil, the sort of run that gives a young band a better sense of what it actually is.
That shift is all over the new EP. Mendes points out that the first record was written by three people who already had ideas about how they wanted H.ISS to sound, but were still feeling their way through a new band. The songs lived in the same area, but they pulled in different directions. This time, the process locked in more naturally.
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“HISS is a band that’s been building itself since the ‘… And Everything Is Falling Again’,” he says. “The first EP was a project conceived by 3 people, in which Herison and I already had many ideas about how to sound, how we wanted it to sound, but that, in practice, led us to compose some songs that move in the same sonic realm, but quite different from each other, after all we were experimenting in a new project, which is perfectly normal.
“In this new work, all four members have their own way of feeling and imagining how something should sound. When we were composing this new EP, things flowed very naturally, in which we managed to unite quite a bit of what we wanted from the final result, it almost seems like a lie, since we’re four completely different minds. At the same time, the intention to release something better than the first work was totally conscious: researching timbres, writing better, and knowing exactly what we’re doing when executing.”
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“Everything is just for one last broken circuit” is where that sharper sense of direction shows itself first. H.ISS describe the song as being built around the image of a collapsing circuit: commands no longer work, maps start lying, and language turns into distant noise. Instead of trying to restore order, the track stays inside the breakdown and watches the pieces fall where they will. That same idea runs through the whole of “This Exhaustion is Not Ours!“.
The EP starts from a plain question: where does the exhaustion that runs through daily life actually come from? From there, H.ISS work through images of failure, saturation, and transformation. These songs deal with bodies turning heavy and numb, memory dissolving, thought outpacing language, and structures that still demand output long after their logic has gone thin. The error here is not treated like a glitch from outside the system. It is in the system, part of its design, and in the band’s telling its collapse can open room for some other way of being.
Across the record, that means a constant pull between collapse and production — broken circuits, failed machines, and whatever new flow might crawl out of the wreckage. Musically, H.ISS move between long atmospheric passages and sudden eruptions, with intense vocals pushing the songs toward contemporary screamo and post-metal without flattening them into either one.
Part of that push came from outside Brazil. “This Exhaustion is Not Ours!” was mixed and mastered by Jack Shirley at The Atomic Garden Studio, whose past work includes Deafheaven, Frail Body, State Faults, and Whirr. The route there goes back to another local band: Herison and João Felipe both played in Deadtrack, now on hiatus, which had previously worked with William Blackmon from Gadget.
“Two of the members (Herison and João Felipe) played in a local band that’s currently on hiatus, called Deadtrack,” Mendes says. “That band worked with William Blackmon from Gadget on mixing and mastering, and the result was really impressive, he managed to bring exactly what the band was looking for at the time. That reference ended up influencing HISS.
“Uberlândia isn’t a big center, it’s an inland city, and many producers need to work with what brings financial return, which ends up pushing them away from heavier or more dissonant sounds. That’s when I got in touch with Jack Shirley. We had been following his work for a while and we’re big fans of Comadre, and he produced a lot of what we like to listen to nowadays. The contact was very direct and professional, we showed him what we wanted and he delivered exactly that. We were very satisfied with the result.”
That same clarity carries into the visual side. The clip for “Everything is just for one last broken circuit” was produced by José Vitor, a friend of the band who works under @zevit_. For Hiss, it is tied not only to the single’s lyrics but to the broader visual identity they wanted around this release. The graphic side of the EP was developed by Luiz Alcamin, aka @moshdigiart, and the band say he hit the mark straight away.
“From the start, it was thought of as something simple, but that expressed a denser, heavier atmosphere,” Mendes says. “We felt it was important to have a music video for this moment of the band and we tried to do it the best way we could. Acting isn’t always so easy for us haha.”
H.ISS are coming out of a city that no longer offers much easy momentum for this kind of band. Uberlândia had a stronger scene in the early 2010s, but Mendes says things are more sporadic now, and heavier, more dissonant stuff still meets resistance at larger local events. “In a way, we operate somewhat isolated here, because to do shows we need to chase after them a lot,” he says. “Outside of here, things flow a bit more easily.”
That has not stopped them from getting out on the road. After the EP’s March 27 release, Hiss are set to play a run of dates in Brazil the following week. The video for “Everything is just for one last broken circuit” is out now, and the band are also on Linktree, Bandcamp, and Instagram at @h.issband.
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