São Bernardo do Campo, the city Undergust call the cradle of Brazilian punk, runs on grind and crust as much as it runs on metalworkers’ unions, skateboarding, and factory work. That’s the ground their new album came out of, and the music has moved to match. “Collapsing In Silence” arrives in roughly two months, dropping most of the thrash hardcore inflection of 2018’s “Chaos Farm” and pushing hard into crust/grind territory.
The eight-year gap between this record and the last one wasn’t planned. Undergust closed 2018 with “Chaos Farm” and played a run of important shows through 2019. Then the pandemic landed in early 2020 and shut everything down.
Vocalist Samuel Vieira moved to another state, and the logistics of keeping the band running became unfeasible. The drummer and guitarist left for other personal projects. Bassist Fábio Gonçalves, Samuel, and Diego Parmito of Forbidden Ideas, who had appeared as a guest on “Chaos Farm”, kept writing through the gap.
“Even with side projects, we never gave up on the band and always believed we would come back,” Fábio says. Samuel moved back to São Paulo in 2024. The pair spent the year hunting for new members, completed the lineup in 2025, and started the creation process for the new album.
The title is loaded before anyone hears a note. “It’s been five years in the making, during which we tried to bring out all of our internal struggles, our individual struggles, and our mental health issues, things we understand many people go through as well,” Fábio explains. The record carries what he calls the band’s vision of human degradation and how it slowly and invisibly destroys people from within. The conversations the band has with audience members before and after shows about exactly these issues are part of the work. Music and art as effective tools that change a person’s life is not abstract here, it’s the operating principle.
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The musical shift wasn’t a calculated move toward heaviness, it was where the influences landed once writing resumed. “We found our musical essence on this album,” Fábio says. “The influence of Samuel and Parmito, who have had crust/grind running through their veins their entire lives, had a huge impact, and naturally our compositions moved further into that punk territory.” Dirtier, faster, denser. Lyrically, nothing softened. “Not writing about what we believe in is simply non-negotiable.”
Two guest vocalists appear on the record: Borela from Rot and Renato Gimenez from Vazio. Both have decades of experience in the Grind/Crust scene of São Paulo and the ABC Paulista region.
“They are great friends of ours and some of the best vocalists here in Brazil,” Samuel says. “Having their voices on one of our projects is a great honor, and it adds a lot artistically.” Renato also tracked, mixed, and mastered the album. Working with him on the engineering side, Fábio says, brought something the band hadn’t had on previous records: “a professional who genuinely likes your music. Renato understands the crust/grind scene like very few people do, and that became evident in the album’s mixing and mastering.”
The lyrics for “Fear” sit stripped down on the page. Scraps, chaos, surviving wars, surviving mental chaos. Samuel doesn’t soften the explanation. “The pandemic (COVID-19) left irreparable traces in the history of Brazil. There were 700,000 deaths, many friends and relatives died, including my father who died from Covid. Panic attacks, anxiety, and mental health struggles became part of our daily lives. So ‘Fear’ is basically a summary of that hell.”
Brazil in 2026 is a different country than the one Undergust were describing in 2018, when Bolsonaro had just been elected. The shift Samuel describes is bleak and concrete.
“Political polarization grew absurdly, and it became clear that half the population supports the advance of fascism in our region.” São Bernardo, in his telling, is where resistance lives. “It’s the land of Grind/Crust, of Skateboarding, the land of Metalworkers’ Unions, the land of factory workers. We try to resist through music that emanates from the periphery.” That periphery is also where the police killings happen, away from the mainstream media’s attention.
“The police here are responsible for many deaths in the peripheral regions, and this is not reported in the mainstream media.” The Bolsonaro family’s bid to return to power in the next elections is the next front.
“They attempted a military coup in the last elections and will try again. They raise the flag of fascism here in Brazil, and many follow this disease.”
Ação Direta and Rot remain reference points for the band. “These scenes here in Brazil are huge, with many bands doing incredible work. In São Paulo, Questions continue to resist and stand strong, as always,” Fábio says. Samuel points to Ação Direta’s recent split with the Germans from Japanische Kampfhorspiele as worth checking. Other São Paulo bands he names as carrying weight and a cohesive message: Trassas, Refugiadas, Void It, Fim da Humanidade Capitalista, and Cranula.
A European tour for 2027 is already locked in on the band’s end, and the long runway is intentional.
“We are 100% certain that we will be in Europe in 2027. Extremely far-reaching planning is important for realizing some important plans: such as participating in the Obscene Extreme Festival, which would be a dream come true for us at Undergust.”
Plenty of songs didn’t make the cut. Five years of writing leaves a surplus. “We’ll definitely include some of them in our future releases,” Fábio says.
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