In Great Pain

In Great Pain is a depressive black metal project rooted in Barbacena, the small Minas Gerais city whose name carries the dark gravitational weight of the so-called Brazilian Holocaust, the Barbacena Psychiatric Hospital where more than sixty thousand patients died over decades of state-sanctioned abuse and neglect. That historical wound has shaped the city's metal output in ways that feel almost inevitable: Barbacena has produced an outsized number of bleak, suicidal, ambient-tinged black metal projects relative to its size, and In Great Pain belongs squarely to that local lineage, sharing aesthetic and creative DNA with Bruno Zr's better-known Ruins Of Purgatory and the broader mineiro DSBM underground. The project's 2024 full-length Drowned In Loneliness And Sorrow lays out its program in song titles alone: An Ode To Suicide, Drowned In Loneliness And Sorrow, Gallows Pole Blues, Lady Of The Waters, Morphine. Musically this is classic DSBM in the Silencer / Shining / Make a Change... Kill Yourself tradition translated into a humid Brazilian register: minor-key tremolo riffs stretched until they fray, mid-tempo blast sections that collapse into funeral-doom drag, anguished shrieks pushed past clarity, and lo-fi production that treats hiss as an instrument rather than a flaw. Like most depressive black metal in Brazil, the project is solitary, self-released, and circulates through the Bandcamp/Telegram underground rather than through formal label channels. In Great Pain is best understood not as a stand-alone curiosity but as a node in the mineiro DSBM network that has slowly turned Barbacena into one of South America's most distinctive depressive-black metal microclimates.