A friend’s studio in Saint Petersburg, twelve hours booked for free, ten of them spent tracking. Sasha set up the microphones himself, tuned the drums, dialed in the sound on each instrument. Masha was there the whole session, energy drinks and fast food between takes. This is how miss your call recorded “I Won’t Say Goodbye” (не скажу прощай), their first single as an emo screamo duo, and one of the more promising debuts to come out of the Russian underground this year.
The band formed in 2026 around a simple decision. Two emo kids who had spent enough time listening to the new wave of American screamo, VS Self and Knumears among them, decided they wanted to make it themselves.
From there the story is mostly practical. First tracks written quickly, played on repeat during rehearsals, one of them turned into a full song after enough notebook pages piled up.
“I opened my notes where I jot down random lines from my head,” Sasha said. “One day, I wrote a lot of lines and decided to piece them together like a puzzle, and that’s how the lyrics for this song came to be.” The finished lyric is five lines long. Every day I dream of you / I won’t have time to reach you / I’ll wake up alone / not forgetting my promises / I won’t say goodbye. It reads like a text someone was writing at three in the morning and never sent.
The tracking took ten hours: drums first, then bass, then two guitars. No pressure, jokes throughout. Sasha handled recording, mixing, and mastering himself, and the finished mix was at a label a week later. The single came out on June 26.
The most interesting choice on the record is the vocal. On stage Sasha screams with proper technique, but for the recording he dropped that entirely.
“I decided to completely abandon that approach so the vocals would be more emotional, in the spirit of the first wave of screamo bands, and I think I pulled it off.” Three takes, then he picked the best one in the mix. The result is a scream that stretches and cracks. It sounds like someone catching a bad thought at the wrong moment and letting it out anyway.
The cover art is high-contrast black and white: a distorted face pressed against a cracked, dry-brush texture, hand-drawn eye and cheekbone lines that look scratched into the surface rather than drawn cleanly.
The title runs vertically down the right side in a jagged, metal-adjacent font. It reads as bedroom-DIY the way early screamo demos looked before the internet flattened everything out.
Sasha is precise about not wanting to change any of it. “To me, music is a snapshot of its time. I think if we’d had two days, I would have worked more on the sound, but whether that would have made the song better or worse is still up for debate. And most likely, we would have just kept tinkering with the sound until we got tired of ourselves.”
The same approach is going into the next release: a mini-demo album recorded live at their rehearsal space, no metronome, tempo held by feel.
Editor’s note: Before publishing, we asked Sasha where the band stands on Russia’s war in Ukraine. His answer: “We condemn all forms of violence, including war.”
Find more screamo in our epic playlist on Spotify:
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