There’s something special about Trhä. The mystical, magical energy summoned forth by this music is something that I simply haven’t heard from any other artist, and something that I doubt I’ll ever hear from somebody else. It’s raw, it’s powerful, it’s inspiring, and it’s completely unique.
Trhä is a project by Damián Ojeda, an Illinois-born artist who’s known for over a dozen musical projects across several genres, such as black metal, screamo, punk, and blackgaze. However, of these very many projects, Trhä sticks out to me in a way that none of the others do. Trhä uses a blend of beautiful synthesizers, crushing guitars, catchy melodies, shrieking vocals, and dozens of other techniques to create a masterwork in every song, doing so in a way that no other artist even comes close to replicating. It’s as if the music comes from another world entirely at times, and that’s kind of the point. In interviews, Damián has stated that Trhä is set within a world of his own creation, one that names Trhä’s most popular release: Endlhëtonëg.
Endlhëtonëg was the first album of Trhä’s that I ever heard. I discovered it on Bandcamp about a year ago, while I was looking for new music to listen to during precalculus, and I fell in love immediately. Suffice to say, I didn’t actually get any work done that class period. More than a year later, I look at Endlhëtonëg as a perfect album. It has four songs, each one around ten minutes long, with the final one being a 25-minute epic. The album’s written like a classical symphony, using each song as a single movement, all of which coalesce into one magical, interwoven piece of some of the best music I’ve ever heard in my life.
Endlhëtonëg makes use of more synths than Trhä had done before, with much less emphasis on the guitars and vocals. It uses space to its utmost, and at points uses drones and pads to create long segments of pure ambiance before slowly building into a more intense feel that uses fast-paced drums and guitars along with the synths to create a much more intense portion of a track. Endlhëtonëg carries with it an air of unknowable mystery, along with a melancholic feeling that pervades each track. This melancholy is broken at points, however, bringing a feeling of hope underneath the darkness.
I bought Endlhëtonëg the second I got home on the day I first discovered it, and a few days after, I wrote a short review as a comment on Bandcamp. I think that summarizes my feelings on the album best:
“This album makes me feel like I’m floating through a deep void after the heat death of the universe, experiencing all the wonders of a world long gone as I fall deeper and deeper into a beautiful dream.”
Another incredible thing about this artist is the volume with which he creates. Trhä alone has released six 20+ minute albums this year, not to mention Damián’s other projects, two of which produce at a similar volume as Trhä. The fact that Damián has been writing music at this volume since the early 2010s just blows my mind, it’s seriously insane.
Aside from the music, the sheer volume of quality work, and uniqueness of the project, there are a couple of other interesting tidbits that should be mentioned. First and foremost is, of course, the language. One of my first thoughts when reading the titles of these albums was, “What do these words mean?” and I’m sure you’ve thought similarly when reading about Trhä and Endlhëtonëg. Unfortunately, these questions are hard to answer. Every word on Trhä’s page, including album and song titles, is written in languages that Damián created on his own. The primary one, Hadlhaj, has been in development since Damián was a teenager. Across the various interviews I’ve scoured, I’ve found precious few translations of words. All we really know is that Trhä means “the key to true perfect magic, true fantastic desires and pleasures, and this distant magic place” (“this place” being the mystical land of Endlhëtonëg), according to an interview with Cheryl Carter of Invisible Oranges. Personally, I’ve found this language, and the clear effort plus Tolkien-caliber world building behind it, to be one of the most interesting parts of this project.
I think it’s also worth mentioning the versatility of Trhä. Not every album is as atmospheric as Endlhëtonëg, nor as heavy as ∫um’ad∂ejja ∫ervaj, nor as catchy as av◊ëlajnt◊ë£ hinnem nihre, but all are amazing in their own ways. Sometimes Trhä draws influence from emo or hardcore (Damián also has a dedicated emo project, Life), sometimes from black metal or dungeon synth, sometimes from genres that I can’t even name. There is no single genre that Trhä falls into, though it is self-labeled as raw black metal. The wide variety of effectively incorporated genres speaks to the pure musicianship of its creator, who does all of this entirely solo. From what I know, all the sounds are created through analog hardware, that is to say, real, physical, guitars, synths, drums, basses, et cetera. All are played by the same person, who also does the (very impressive) vocals. Damián is not only proficient with every one of these instruments, but also extremely skilled with each of them.
Most would assume that a one-man project of this caliber would never play live, and you’d be fair to think so. It’s extremely hard to transfer this kind of music into a coherent live experience, with 15 minute songs being the norm and the musicianship being so advanced, yet somehow Trhä makes do. There have been many live shows, the most recent being a short 3-show tour through the American Midwest towards the end of the summer of 2025. These shows happen by recruiting fans of the project to play as a live band with Damián– personally, I think that’s the coolest way of creating a live show as a one-person project that you could do. It’s impressive that Trhä has such a devoted community surrounding it, and that there are enough extremely skilled musicians willing to play live.
All things considered, Trhä is quite possibly the best musical artist that I know of. There’s just something incredible about the nature of a project like this, so unique and magical that there’s truly nothing like it in the world. Once again, there’s something special about Trhä.
Go give it a listen: https://trha.bandcamp.com/music
