Zhaat – Other Prophets
Noisolution – 2025
Rock, Stoner, Psych, Kraut
Rated: ***
From the shadowed alleyways of Leipzig’s underground rises Zhaat. A band that breaths their sound in a ritualistic summoning. You've just put on their debut album Other Prophets and you feel the atmosphere that their wild hybrid of stoner rock, doom, post hardcore and middle eastern psychedelia conjures, a sound that hums with danger, mysticism and explosive catharsis.
It all starts with Ramses, a song that drifts like a desert wind, slow, shimmering and scented with ancient smoke. Soon the ground cracks, the tempo swells and the vocals tear through the calm, shifting from whispered incantations into blood and fire screaming. They claim their stake on tension immediately, and they don’t build with it, they wield it, like a scimitar…
And that splicing, that whirling, turns into a showcase of their art of contrast. With tracks like The Seer and Tikal being even grander examples of that art, flowing between hypnotic grooves and explosive breakdowns. Feeling that eerie melodic drone underneath, something that will forever resemble those Sufi ceremonies that went rogue. The pulsing heartbeat is delivered by the rhythm section and those shimmering mirages are brought to you by the guitars distortion and delicacy.
Even at its heaviest, there is still that, the trance like pull drawing you into the sound of Zhaat. The chaos of Kante, the ritual frenzy of Divine Command deliver that heaviness as well as those parching visions. Vocals, sparse and often textural, echoing those ancient voices that fell from the walls of caves and are still the ghosts among the ruins. Often, you will feel like you are listening to the sounds of an ancient and forgotten rite. Played from found sonic glyph carvings on cracked clay tablets. For all of you that crave the spiritual side of heaviness, the ritual by riffs, Zhaat is the prophet you should follow…
(Written by JK)
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