I’ve hollowed out my head. I’ve hollowed out my dead heart. It’s flatlined, but I’m fine. I’ve sawed off my legs. In blood, I crawl to you. My image of a man. That’s the opening of “100 Percent Wool”, the first track on Hiss’s debut album “A Cheapened Crown“. Robert Comitz wrote the lines as a self-portrait drawn from someone else’s body. The bootlicker. The unconditional follower of whatever the current regime is putting on offer. By the end of the song, that someone is flossing with the laces of the same boot they spend the rest of the day licking.
“I was trying to be visual with the lyrics, while describing simply how these bootlickers, who unconditionally follow the current regime, are heartless pieces of shit,” Robert said. “They will do anything for a taste of the boot, all the way to flossing with its lace. It’s hilarious how some people throw the word ‘sheep’ around and don’t see the hypocrisy, at all. Not surprised. They’re fucking stupid.”
Hiss is a three-piece from Portland, Oregon. Robert plays guitar and sings. Kirk Evans plays bass and sings. Chase Hall plays drums. None of them are new to this. Robert and Kirk used to play together in Still/Form. Robert and Chase used to play together in Marriage + Cancer. Hiss is what happens when the heaviest players from each band end up in the same room, with lower tunings and less interest in genre lines than either of the parent projects had.
Their debut, “A Cheapened Crown”, arrives August 21st as a three-way release between Dipterid Records, Hex Records, and the band. Ten tracks, recorded at LoRent Studio, mixed by Bob Cheek at Exex, mastered by Carl Saff.
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Calling “A Cheapened Crown” sludge or noise rock isn’t wrong, but it isn’t enough either. The guitars do something familiar to anyone who followed Marriage + Cancer, scraping and lurching in ways that don’t snap into riffs the first time through. The low end carries the kind of weight Still/Form was after on its slower stretches. Robert’s vocals sit on top in a permanent scrape, somewhere between a growl and a complaint shouted at someone who can’t be reasoned with. Chase’s drums anchor everything and make the room feel smaller than it is.
“With Hiss, I knew it was going to crush,” Robert said. “Chase is the hardest hitting drummer I have ever played with, fueling this thing. And Kirk is exceptional at finding what to play with the weird shit I throw at him sometimes, note-wise. He is also known around town for having very, very good tone.”
The low tunings are new. Robert mentions it directly. He wanted Hiss to simplify, to push into territory that Marriage + Cancer and Still/Form had never gone into, and the re-learning has been part of the project from the start.
“It’s been fun writing and re-learning the guitar sometimes with these tunings and songs,” he said.
The record’s second single, “Buried in Current”, arrives today as the harder ask of the two openers. “Our offer of refuge, is drowning alive…. buried in current, and the weight of our sea.” The verses move into colder territory. “Cuz we lie, and rape, and kill, but not you. You will be good in our home. You’ll speak in our tongue, praising our god. You will be good, but never belong.”
The song is a monologue from inside the assimilation pressure, not a comment on it from outside. Robert wants this clear.
“In ‘Buried in Current‘, ‘We’ is the white man, and ‘you’ is the immigrant,” he said. “DO NOT confuse this song as if I personally feel this way. Like ‘100% Wool’, it’s written through the lense of a bigot. Still/Form had a song titled ‘God will understand why you’re horny for kids’, and someone actually thought we were down with child abuse. We are not. At all.”
Putting both songs at the head of the album is its own statement. Two character studies, both written from inside ugly mouths, both refusing to massage the speaker into something easier for the listener to sit with. Robert doesn’t tell anyone how to feel about either character. He leaves them in the room.
Bob Cheek’s mix got the album where it needed to land. Robert recorded the parts himself and handed them to Bob, whose credits include two Haunted Horses records Robert names among his favourites, alongside work with Bronson Arm and Elephant Rifle.
“Bob Cheek did a fantastic job, as I knew he would,” Robert said. “He is responsible for 2 of my favorite records from the Seattle band Haunted Horses. He cleaned up what I recorded and turned it into a thick, punchy, raw and lively record. We are very happy with how this album came out!”
The band wanted the record as heavy as it could be without making the needle skip. That’s a real engineering concern with sludge and noise-rock pressings, and the album was tracked, mixed and mastered with that ceiling in mind. The result is dense without losing legibility. Carl Saff’s master holds it together.
“A Cheapened Crown” comes out on August 21st through Dipterid Records, Hex Records, and the band. Three vinyl variants of 100 copies each. The snake blood red, standard black, and the smokey ghost, which Hex Records describes as “clear with swirling white vinyl, possibly haunted. Not sure.” There’s also a CD pressing in eco-pack. Pre-orders are open via Bandcamp.
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