After dropping Old Songs 2015, Damián—the one-man force behind Sadness—wasted no time. Tortuga is the sound of him back in the lab, creating something original again, and it hits.

The opener August Flower kicks things off with an eerie, Deftones-adjacent structure. Still, this is pure Sadness. You know the recipe: clean intros, ghostly reverb-drenched guitars, drums buried just deep enough to feel like a dream, and songwriting that takes genuinely unexpected turns. The whole album burns with raw, restless emotion. At nearly an hour, it never drags. It flows like it was built in one go—moody, dynamic, and relentlessly immersive.

Production-wise, Tortuga sounds polished, maybe the cleanest Sadness release to date. It’s got that full-studio presence, the kind of leap forward that makes you wonder if labels are finally paying attention.

Musically, this is classic Sadness—but it also isn’t. There's less reliance on keys this time, with more space carved out for atmosphere and the slow creep of blackgaze elements coming back into the fold. It’s an evolution, not a retread.

If there’s a centerpiece here, it’s Your Hands Melt Into Mine. The bass on this one is ridiculously mellow—so smooth it’s almost narcotic. And then, post-intro, it hits a kind of peace that’s hard to describe. The guitars don’t just shimmer—they move, almost like they’re breathing. The song is a riff machine, and so is the rest of the album. Riffs on riffs on riffs.

In the end, Tortuga is a killer blackgaze release.