Athens, Georgia indie pop outfit Masters of the Hemisphere originated in 1996 when singers and songwriters Sean Rawls and Bren Mead, close friends whose high-school years already included stints in Jasper's Arm, Vetran, Volcano Clutch, Eat Rice on Friday, and Linus, assembled the group. Several of those earlier projects appeared on cassettes issued by the pair's own Everybody's Wearing Them imprint. After Mead's family moved to New Mexico, the two kept composing and tracking material on their own and even mapped out an unreleased split cassette for Kindercore titled Nose Plug. Once they reconvened in Athens, they launched Masters of the Hemisphere, enlisting Kindercore head Ryan Lewis on drums, a role later assumed by the Mendoza Line's Jeff Griggs. The band introduced itself with the EP Going on a Trek to Iceland, then grew into a quartet upon multi-instrumentalist Adrian Finch's arrival. Their self-titled debut LP arrived in 1999; the following year brought the ambitious concept album I Am Not a Freemdoom, packaged with an accompanying comic book. In May 2010 the group staged a reunion concert in Athens and devoted ten days to tracking Maybe These Are the Breaks, which Magic Marker issued in October 2011.
