Croatia isn’t the first country that comes to mind when someone says “black metal.” It has no frozen mountains and no Vikings, but it has been through plenty. And in the middle of all that, one man decided to make some noise: Boris Behara, also known as Boris T, the mind behind Tryglav, a one-man black metal project that started in Croatia and came of age in Italy.
“`From war to Italy
Boris Behara was born in 1989 in Croatia, which was then part of Yugoslavia. A few years later, the Yugoslav Wars broke out. His father feared for their lives and sent Boris and his mother to Italy, staying behind himself. He grew up in Arezzo, Tuscany, yet proudly calls himself a Croatian black metal artist.
As a kid he started out on nu metal, with Linkin Park as his first record and Slipknot after that. Little by little he moved toward the extreme side, went to shows like Exodus, and discovered Burzum and Mayhem through magazines. He also loved 80s horror films.
The birth of Tryglav
In Italy the black metal scene was practically nonexistent. He himself has said that only about 30 people showed up to one gig. He joined several bands, but none of them lasted, since the members drank and skipped rehearsals. In 2018 he reached his limit and decided to do something entirely his own.
The name is no accident: it comes from the three-headed Slavic god Triglav, who looks over the sky, the earth and the underworld, keeping the balance between light and darkness. It’s also a mountain in Slovenia. To Boris it felt like a mirror of himself: past, present and future.
From a small apartment in Italy he did everything alone: guitars, drums, lyrics, mixing. He worked a day job and made music at night, revising each track three or four times before considering it finished.
The records
In 2019 he released the debut “Night of Whispering Souls,” a cinematic blend of melody and aggression inspired by 80s horror movies. The instruments and production were his own, while the vocals were handled by a session singer.
Four years later, in 2023, came “The Ritual.” A concept album with its own cinematic world: the story unfolds in the 17th century and opens with a man dying in his bed while his parents call for plague doctors. Musically it’s sharper and colder, and critics described it as a modern war epic disguised as black metal — the same lineage traced by the Venom discography tribute, which paved the way for extreme metal.
Heart and persistence
Behind the music there was something far darker. Boris underwent two open-heart surgeries. The first left him exhausted, with no assurance he would ever play again. The second almost ended the project. He now takes heart medication for the rest of his life.
As he has said himself, that period was chaos: a pandemic, two surgeries and an album he accidentally erased once it was finally done. Even so, he never stopped writing, recording and uploading videos.
Norway and the next step
Over the years YouTube became more than a hobby. He started with drum and guitar covers, then spoke openly about the difficulties of a one-man project, and ended up making vlogs. When he moved to Norway, the birthplace of black metal, he filmed the places he had read about in magazines: studios, cemeteries, burned churches, quiet towns. He doesn’t glorify the crimes, he simply shows the history.
Norway fed his creativity. He tours across Europe and is building a devoted following, while working on the next album, on which he will sing himself for the first time. You don’t need a whole scene to make something that lasts.
See also
If the genre’s pull still works on you, a tribute to 39 years of Greek black metal shows how much another scene built from the ground up, while why metal still matters today is a good companion read on what drives people like Boris.
