SADNESS
For a decade, Sadness existed almost entirely in secret. Damián Antón Ojeda built the project alone from a bedroom in Oak Park, Illinois in 2014, releasing dozens of albums, EPs and splits into a corner of the internet only the most devoted fans knew to look for. Close (Depressive Illusions Records, 2014) started it all, and 2019's Circle of Veins and I Want to Be There turned Sadness into something closer to a cult secret passed hand to hand. The secret didn't stay contained for long. A first live show in Chicago in 2024 was followed, within two years, by a session in KEXP's Seattle studio as a full six-piece band, exactly the kind of moment longtime listeners had waited a decade to see happen. 2027 marks the year that momentum finally reaches Europe.
What makes Sadness compelling isn't just the scale of the catalogue, but how personal all of it stays. For years, Ojeda wrote, played and sang every part alone, often finishing a song's music in a single sitting only to spend years working out how to sing it. Songs stretch past fifteen or twenty minutes, built less like conventional compositions than long emotional arcs that gather tension and hold it until it finally breaks open. Turning that world into a live band has meant handing pieces of it to other musicians for the first time, tremolo guitars now doubled, a second voice answering Ojeda's own, a wall of sound built by six people instead of one. None of it has softened the project's core contrast, harsh and tender in the same breath, only given it more room to expand.
WHAT TO EXPECT
A Sadness performance moves in real time from one extreme to the other. Tremolo guitars collide with screamed vocals, quiet passages gather and release without warning, and the set's two voices trade lines until they finally lock together for a final, expansive close. For a project that spent a decade existing almost entirely alone in a bedroom, watching it fill a stage with six people and still hit just as hard is something close to witnessing overdue recognition happen in real time.
