Bandcamp Naming your second album after the band is a move with two meanings. Either you have arrived at what you are, or the first record was a sketch and this is the statement. For a trio from northern Italy who put out Stuck On Common Ground two years ago, and who describe themselves as a kosmo kraut band on a label that mostly sells fuzz and riffs, it reads as the first one. This is hijss saying: this is the thing, stop looking for the genre.
The cover makes the same argument faster. A herd of cows, photographed from below, the whole image drowned in magenta with a mint green logo over it. On a Heavy Psych Sounds release, surrounded by desert landscapes and occult woodcuts, it is practically a provocation. Nothing about it says doom. Nothing about the record does either.
What the label bought
Lois Lane on guitar, vocals and electronics, Maurice on drums, Pan on bass and synth. Maurizio Baggio produced, engineered and mastered it, Paolo Canaglia mixed. Eight tracks, just under forty minutes, and the band’s own description namechecks synth-punk, industrial krautrock and no wave in a single sentence.
That is a lot of flags to plant, and the record does not honour all of them equally. What it actually does, consistently, is motorik: a rhythm section that locks and refuses to develop while the guitars and synths change around it. On “dopamine” and “vicious cycle” that works exactly as intended, four and five minutes that feel shorter because the pulse never asks you to track it. On “parasite”, the shortest thing here, it runs out of ideas before it runs out of time.
The edges are the record
The two longest pieces are the two best, and they sit at either end. “drain of thoughts” opens on texture and takes its time before anything resembling a riff arrives. “S.W.A.N.” is the warmest and darkest thing on the album by a clear distance, with far more weight at the bottom and far less up top than anything around it, and it is the one track where the band sound like they are playing a room rather than assembling a track.
Between them, the middle four hold a noticeably tighter shape: brighter, narrower, less willing to move between quiet and loud. “underwater” is the exception, a dry close-recorded opening that gives way to the full weight partway through, and it is the only song in that stretch that earns a second listen on structure rather than on groove.
Then there is “outro”, which opens up wider than anything else here and carries the least treble on the record. Calling it an outro undersells it. It is the most committed piece of writing on the album and it is hidden behind the laziest possible title.
The reservation, plainly
Worth your time, and the caveat is about consistency rather than quality. When hijss commit to a single idea for seven minutes they are genuinely good, and three tracks here do that. The four in the middle are competent motorik that could be swapped around without anyone noticing, which on a record this short is a third of the running time spent holding position. A record that calls itself by the band’s name is claiming to be definitive. This one is a strong sketch of something that is going to be definitive next time.
If you want the quick version: start at “S.W.A.N.” and finish on “outro”, then go back for the opener.
The album splits into edges and middle. “drain of thoughts”, “S.W.A.N.” and “outro” carry the record’s shape: “S.W.A.N.” puts nearly a third of its energy below 250 hertz and holds the lowest tonal centre on the album by a wide margin, “outro” runs the widest distance between its quiet and loud passages at over fourteen decibels and carries the least energy above five kilohertz, and both sit noticeably darker than everything between them. The four middle tracks cluster tightly, tonal centres within three hundred hertz of each other and quiet-to-loud distances between six and nine decibels, which is a narrow band for music built on contrast. “underwater” is the one that breaks out, nearly twelve decibels of range and the second lowest tonal centre, which matches a track that begins on a close dry recording and opens into the full arrangement partway through. Nothing here has been mastered flat.
Standout tracks: S.W.A.N., outro, drain of thoughts
