Khanate 'To Be Cruel'

After a 14-year silence, Khanate return with 'To Be Cruel', a towering, unrelenting statement of doom pushed to its outermost edges. Built from sessions dating back to 2017 and slowly shaped over years, the album finds the legendary quartet—Stephen O’Malley, James Plotkin, Alan Dubin, and Tim Wyskida—distilling their harrowing sound into something even more corrosive and precise. Every moment is stretched to near-collapse, dragging the listener through dread-drenched atmospheres and agonizing space.

The band’s signature style—temporal abstraction, suffocating volume, and guttural vocal horror—remains intact but newly evolved. Tracks unfold like rituals: slow, deliberate, and punishingly heavy. Mixed by Randall Dunn alongside the band in 2020, 'To Be Cruel' isn’t just a return—it’s a redefining, a renewal of purpose through maximum restraint and tension. This is Khanate at their most methodical, their most merciless, and perhaps their most essential.