North African experimental avant-garde/blackgaze/noise solo project Caged Bastard stream new full-length album »Cold, Cruel.«

North African experimental avant-garde/blackgaze/noise solo project Caged Bastard has just released the third full-length album »Cold, Cruel.« on January 6th, 2026. This is a concept album in a single 36 minutes long track, available now on Bandcamp.

Watch a full visualizer/short film for »Cold, Cruel.« below!

Tracklist:
01. Cold, Cruel. (36:36)

Caged Bastard is the uncompromising solo project of multi-national musician Muhammad Oun. Through a visceral mix of black metal, drone, ambient, and noise, the project explores the outer edges of sonic intensity and psychological dissection. Entirely self-produced, Caged Bastard is more than a musical endeavor, it’s a radical statement of artistic autonomy and a violent rejection of the sanitized, trend-driven music industry. The result is a deeply personal and confrontational sound that defies genre and expectation.

»Cold, Cruel.« is not an album built on melody, but on observation, a plunge into the stillness that remains when illusion collapses.

It follows the presence of the Observer, a consciousness suspended between two dying worlds, one clothed in purity and restraint, the other burning with hunger, greed, hate, and lies. Through its gaze, order and chaos reveal themselves as reflections of the same wound, existence feeding endlessly upon itself.

As the record unfolds, time bends. Perception sharpens into a blade. The architecture of morality shatters, dignity becomes performance, and truth dissolves into noise.

Through this process, the Observer transforms. At first detached, then estranged, until detachment itself becomes a form of cruelty. Not cruelty of flesh or violence, nor of domination or intent, but an existential cruelty, the cold logic of seeing without the need to react, forgive, or believe. Awareness cuts not because it desires to, but because clarity annihilates illusion by its very nature.

There is no redemption here. No salvation. Only the slow symmetry of collapse. Meaning crumble until only the gaze remains, cold, precise, and unblinking. By the end, cruelty and awareness fuse into a single frequency, not malice, but lucidity without comfort.

»Cold, Cruel.« is the sound of consciousness devouring its own reflection, a meditation on truth beyond morality, and the echo that remains once the world has finished pretending to be alive.

The Observer now feels like a monk walking out of a burning house, without running.

Credits: Lyrics, all music written, recorded, performed, mixed & mastered by Muhammad Oun.

Video: Some footage is AI-generated and edited by Muhammad Oun.

Bojan Bidovc // music enthusiast, promoter, misanthrop and sometimes a journalist as well