In 2012, Gabriel Gaba and his wife moved from their home country of Brazil to Ireland. Both professional graphic designers, they initially came to Europe on a one-year working visa, but soon stayed in Dublin as they loved it so much.

Back home, Gabriel had been a vocalist for several cover projects, but it wasn’t until he was a year in Dublin that he would form his first original project – the grunge five-piece Divide of Everything.

When asked why it took him moving to Ireland to start his first original band, Gabriel told Post-Burnout, “Because I’ve always liked music that’s sung in English, listening to metal and hard rock… – just, these genres that are sung in English, typically – …and the kind of singing that I do, with the high notes and stuff, that’s not really a thing in Brazil for local artist.”

“So, it was always a point of frustration for me, because the music I liked to play is heavy music and that kind of singing, and there’s always pressure to do it in Portuguese, and it doesn’t really work the same.

“So, that, to me, was the number one thing that I liked the most about moving here. ‘OK, now I can sing in English, and dedicate to the genres I like, rather than adapt to a minimal platform.’ So, I was happy that way.

“And one thing that worked to my advantage here is the type of singing I do… – like, with the high notes, the belting, and clean singing in the context of heavy metal – …that’s not something you get so much here. Most metal bands or heavy bands would have screaming or lower-tone vocals. I don’t know the explanation for that. It’s just a cultural thing, I suppose.”

When Divide of Everything recorded their first EP that year, a local producer called John O’Kelly engineered their sessions. By Gabriel’s admission, he and John didn’t exactly become great friends right away, but they became close enough that they felt comfortable adding each other on Facebook.

After Divide of Everything disbanded, Gabriel started a progressive metal band, called Sectile, in 2016, who enjoyed success in the local metal scene before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, making it impossible for them to continue.

During the pandemic, Gabriel’s tastes expanded. “At that period, I was more interested in post-rock, shoegaze, and post-metal,” Gabriel says of his lockdown listening habits. “More ambient stuff.”

Isolated in his home, Gabriel began writing heavy instrumentals that incorporated these spacious and gazey elements. Hitherto, Gabriel performed exclusively as a vocalist, but now he was essentially forced to take up the guitar if he wanted to pen his creations.

“That would’ve been in 2022, at that point,” Gabriel remembers. “And, after I had a few demos, I just posted them online, and made a couple of posts on social media, just saying, ‘Hey, guys. I want to form a post-rock band, and, if anyone is interested, give me a shout.’ Then John reached out, and that’s how we reconnected.

“I couldn’t imagine at the time that he would be interested in being in a band with me, just because we hadn’t had much contact at that point, but I knew he had great taste because he was the only other guy that I know in Ireland who liked IAMX, which is this artist that’s fantastic, and I knew it from his Facebook posts.”

The two began working on some instrumentals they had together, which incorporated elements from doom, metal, shoegaze, post-rock and -metal, electronica, and experimental music. “I think he complements my chaotic, intuitive process so well, because he has much more knowledge,” Gabriel says of how they worked together.

After christening the project T R Y S T E from the first letter of the EP’s title, the two began working on an EP’s worth of songs.  While John was content to allow the project to exist within the studio, a gig-hungry Gabriel, who had not performed live since the lockdowns, really wanted to expand it and put it on the road.

“John hasn’t played in any live bands in a while,” says Gabriel. “And, before we sat down to record the EP, we spent a good few months trying to form a band. So, the first thing we tried was to form a band and play as a collective. It wasn’t to make a studio project.”

But the two were unable to find other committed musicians available to form a consistent line-up for the versatility of instruments required to replicate their songs live. Around this time, Gabriel joined the doom metal band Death the Leveller, which satisfied his desire to play live, and T R Y S T E were able to continue as a studio project in the meantime.

In 2025, their years of craft were finally exhibited to the public. Of the five songs on their debut EP, they chose its opener, “The Long Journey,” as their debut single in July, as the eight-minute-long celestial and weighty soundscape perfectly encapsulated the bountiful journey that listeners should expect to take with this project.

This single was followed by “Pipe Dream” in September and “Vessel” in October, before the full EP, To Rise You Seek the End, dropped last month. “It’s not a concept piece,” Gabriel says of the EP. “We decided which were the best demos we had. [We] grabbed some that I brought, some that he brought, and decided which were better developed so that we could record. So, it was more pragmatic.

“This is something that people have pointed out, that there’s a bit of variety in the EP. The songs are reasonably different to each other, although they’re still recognisable as being part of the same thing, and that’s how I like it. That’s how I like an album to be. I like to listen to an album that has different moments that are discernible, as opposed to it just blending in together.”

 T R Y S T E’s debut EP, To Rise You Seek the End, is out now. You can keep up with the band on Bandcamp, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook.

Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews…tonight at 23:00 (IST) to hear this interview in full. Available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music Podcasts.

Aaron Kavanagh

Aaron Kavanagh is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Post-Burnout. His writing can also be found in the Irish Daily Star, Buzz.ie, Totally Dublin, The GOO, Headstuff, New Noise Magazine, XS Noize, DSCVRD and more.