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Sadness

Sadness began as the solo recording project of Damian Anton Ojeda, braiding shoegaze's serenity, post-rock's scale, and black metal's melodrama into long tracks built around surging, cathartic crescendos that “supersize” his feelings. He didn't perform any of it live until May 2024, when Sadness debuted onstage backed by a full band; it's since grown into a six-piece. 2019's Circle of Veins is where all three sounds first locked into place.

Cover art for Sadness's Circle of Veins (2019), a close-up nature photo of sunlit tree foliage.
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More about Sadness

Sadness runs on a specific refusal: don't think about whether it's good. Ojeda has described making the project's early songs without editing or reconsidering anything -- "I just made them" -- as a deliberate reaction against more composed, deliberate songwriting he's found exhausting elsewhere. That refusal is audible: the crescendos don't build toward a payoff so much as keep escalating past the point a more careful arrangement would have pulled back, as if the recording caught the feeling before it could be revised into something smaller. The songs read less like compositions than like transcripts.

Listen: Circle of Veins (2019) — Bandcamp
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