How Khanate Became The Most Terrifying Band in Music (A Conversation with Alan Dubin)
Header Credit: Maiken Kildegaard
For the first five minutes and nine seconds of Like A Poisoned Dog, Alan Dubin doesn’t say a word, but you can feel his presence. He just breathes raggedly into the microphone.
"I wanted to make it suffocating right out of the gate," Dubin explains via Google Meet. The intro to Like A Poisoned Dog was the first five minutes of music doom metal titans Khanate released in almost fifteen years. The band dropped their album To Be Cruel on May 19th 2023, without telling a soul and it made many metalheads happy (myself included). "I didn’t know what I wanted to do right away, but I wanted to build-up atmosphere and create a mindset of claustrophobia."
Spoiler: it worked.
When I discovered the music of Khanate, the band had already broken up and there seemed to be little hope for a reunion. If you’re not familiar with their music, you’re either blessed or cursed, depending on your personal tastes and threshold for sonic discomfort. Khanate isn’t just another band. It’s legit fucked up music. It’s the doomiest doom metal you’ve ever heard and it doesn’t have much to do with the doom metal you already know. "It's doomier than doom," Dubin likes to say.
The most interesting wrinkle about Khanate is that it’s fucked up music played by the most normal-looking guys. One of the members is Stephen O’Malley, also known for his work in Sunn O))) and his growing output of experimental music. The bassist is renowned studio engineer James Plotkin and the drummer Tim Wyskida is unbound by music genres or conventions.
A lot of why Khanate is so terrifying has to do with their vocalist Alan Dubin (who also seems rather normal) and it fascinates me. So I asked him about it.
Credit: Ebru Yildiz
From O.L.D to the COLDest music you’ve ever heard
It’s through James Plotkin that Alan Dubin met the other members of the band.
These two have been friends since they were teenagers. The two bonded over music and tape trading in high school gravitated towards music together. They formed the grindcore band Old Lady Drivers together, which became just O.L.D over time. "We were just really good friends with the same crazy, juvenile sense of humor. We still are," says Dubin.
He played guitar first, but ended up switching to vocals. "I knew right away I wasn’t good enough. That I wasn’t going to be a lead guitarist. I wasn’t born with that ability."
If you’ve never heard O.L.D, you’re missing out. It started as an old school New Jersey grindcore band and turned into some kind of extreme (but quite fun), unclassifiable electronic UFO.
“I was trying to mimic some of the early stuff I was listening to,” claims the vocalist as he explains the creation of his bone chilling vocal style. "I kind of wanted to sound like Pushead, from Septic Death or Blaine, from The Accüsed. But it came out with that high screeching voice, like some Attack of the Killer Tomatoes vocals. I just kept doing it and developed my own style."
People Dubin worked with loved it. They were into it. He CAN sing clean, by the way. But he’s not sure how much all these years of shrieking damaged his voice.
O.L.D broke up in 1995, but Dubin and Plotkin continued to hang out and make music together. The latter met Tim Wyskida through mutual acquaintances and the three became good friends. Plotkin and Wyskida met Stephen O’Malley, who had just moved to New York to work at an ad agency, at an ISIS show in 2000. "We were all into Burning Witch already. None of us had a “main band” to properly speak of. Sunn O))) wasn’t really going yet. They invited him to jam and that’s how it all came together, I believe."
Sunn O))) had only released The Grimmrobe Demos then. Burning Witch was one of O’Malley’s first bands which had pushed the boundaries and explored the possibilities of how grim and fucked up doom metal could be. The bands have little in common, but Khanate picked up where Burning Witch left off and took it much, much further than the former ever did.
The Rise and Fall and Rise of Khanate (Or How to Innocuously Create Fucked Up Art)
"We had to rehearse a lot at first to get the cues down."
No one was ready for Khanate. Not even the members of the band who had to learn how to work closely together in order to pursue such a peculiar sound on stage. "That’s why I stand sideways on stage. I have to look at the other guys in order to get specific cues. People wonder about that a lot," says Alan Dubin.
The crowds were even less ready for Khanate’s ultra loud and disembodied brand of drone doom metal. "People came to see other bands we were playing with because we were new once we’d start playing, they’d run for the door ‘holy shit, what the fuck is that’”, he added with a laugh. "We scared a lot of people because of the volume we played at. Stephen had his setup he’s now famous for. No one knew what to expect.
People were freaked out, but they were also mesmerized. No one had ever heard anything like this before and no one has ever since. The only thing I could ever find that’s even remotely close to Khanate’s sound is defunct Texas-based duo Senthil and even they didn’t go as far.
"We met a lot of fucked up people too. Once, we played a gig in Iowa and this dude showed up. He seemed nice, but he wouldn’t look at any of us in the eye and showed us a photo of this sculpture he made inspired by Pieces of Quiet. There was a bed and what looked like a real leg under. It had blood smeared all over," reminisces the vocalist.
He also tells me about an email he received about a man who reached out after reading Khanate’s lyrics and claimed they were seeing eye-to-eye.
The band became quite successful for their creative idiom and released three albums: their immortal self-titled, Things Viral and Capture & Release. They attracted a crowd as varied as it was intense. "We had college teachers bringing their music students, people who were more into the dread and the atmosphere and metalheads who kept waiting for the part where they could headbang, which never came. When the music starts it’s all invisible grapefruits and cell phones anyway."
They broke up a first time in 2006, but managed to release their fourth album Clean Hands Go Foul in 2009 before calling it quits for close to fifteen years. "Beside getting a little fed up with each other even if we were great friends (we all have strong egos), I really think it had to do with being presented with lengthy tours. Stephen was having Sunn O))) dates and I have a career, so it was hard to be a working band," says Dubin.
Only a little time passed before they were all friends again though, but it would take Khanate over a decade to come back from the dead. It all started with Stephen O’Malley and Tim Wyskida jamming together in Europe and coming through with material that sounded a whole lot like Khanate. They brought it up to Alan and Jim and it didn’t take long before the machine started revving again.
As it is the case with many great things, we would’ve had To Be Cruel sooner if it weren’t for the pandemic. Old school fans (such as myself) were in a frenzy when the album dropped. It stopped the presses for a while and made it difficult to finish the record. "It was difficult to keep it a secret because a handful of people knew, but we did. We surprised a lot of people," said Dubin.
Credit : Maiken Kildegaard
Becoming the scariest man in music
Alan Dubin looks nothing like the screeching psychothic boogeyman you picture him to be upon hearing a Khanate record. As we’re talking, he wears a teal baseball hat over his long hair, glasses and sits at his workstation. He’s working from home on a Saturday afternoon, but took an hour off to chit chat with me. "It’s gonna give me a break from the job," he claims.
He has the demeanor of a man who doesn’t consider himself scary at all. In his everyday life, he’s a video and color editor for movies and television, by the way.
When I observe that he stands something like Saturn in Goya’s classic painting Saturn Devouring His Son when he performs on stage, he stops me right there. "I don’t really think about how I stand when I perform because I’m too busy being on the lookout for cues from the other guys. I sing with my entire body, though. After a day or two of performing, even my legs hurt. Maybe it’s the stance I use. But I do need to stand a certain way in order to emote the way I want it to."
Dubin writes all his songs from the point of view of the narrating character. No one gave him any instructions to create this apocalyptic paradigm that Khanate is now associated with. "I just thought it sounded like serial killer music, you know?" says Dubin.
Even though it doesn’t transpire to everybody, Dubin tries to scatter little bits and pieces of humor in his work. Sometimes it’s something silly, sometimes it’s something so extreme or obscene that it’ll make the band laugh. He explains that when the band performs the song Commuted from Things Viral, some audiences will start laughing at pieces of us in my hands, on the floor, in my pockets or will straight up singalong when he shrieks "red glory". "I’m at an all-time low" and "the spider is us" from To Be Cruel are a big hit too.
If you stop and think about it for a second, it’s true that it is a little silly.
“It’ll happen sometimes when we record that I’ll do something so extreme in the booth while tracking vocals that the guys will fall over laughing. It doesn’t always have to do with lyrics. When I turn red from screaming or if I just shriek at some unexpected timing, it will do the trick,” he adds, laughing.
Khanate became the most terrifying band in music through sheer excellence. They’re just good at what they do and driven at accomplishing their crystal clear creative vision. That’s how they manage to be terrifying only with the music.
Dedicated musicianship. Driven artistry. Total commitment to what they do.
If you ears are virgin and you're curious (or if you just want to get their brand of sonic desolation again), their five LPs are on Spotify and all the other platforms.
Khanate will be performing in Prepare The Ground Festival in Toronto from May 30th to June 1st 2025. If you want to catch them and live this unparalleled experience for yourself, you should book your tickets now as it's unclear how much more of Khanate we'll get. "It's up in the air right now, but there's some optimism. We haven't really talked about it together so far," says Dubin.
* Follow me on Instagram to keep up with new posts *
