On his latest full-length release Fire in the Master’s House, Sheykh Forever brings political subject matter into direct contact with disco, funk, rock and electronic music.
The fourteen-track album, written, produced, mixed and mastered at home by Iraqi-born, London-based musician Mostafa Al over four years, centres on war, displacement, propaganda and survivor’s guilt. Its scope is broad, but the writing remains grounded in personal and inherited consequences rather than abstract commentary.
That’s clear from the opening ‘I’m Your History’, which addresses displacement through the language of home and belonging. Elsewhere, ‘Ghosts!’ and ‘Same Disease’ continue that focus, examining how violence and trauma can persist beyond the immediate moment and pass from one generation to the next.
But rather than relying on sombre arrangements throughout, he uses disco and funk rhythms, heavy guitars, electronic textures and warped pop structures to keep the record in motion. ‘Sleeping Dogs’ and ‘Run for Cover’ are particularly representative of that approach, combining rhythmic urgency with a sense of unease.
The result is not carefree dance music, but neither is it relentlessly oppressive. Its middle ground is one of the album’s more effective qualities. The grooves provide momentum while the lyrics and production retain a darker edge, allowing the record to shift between immediacy and reflection.
Vintage hardware and digital production are combined across the record, creating music that can move from melodic and accessible to abrasive or disorientating without warning. Comparisons to Nicolas Jaar, Blood Orange and the Bar-Kays make sense in terms of genre fluidity, though Sheykh Forever’s strongest moments come when those influences become secondary to the album’s own internal logic.
Across Fire in the Master’s House, there’s grief, frustration, urgency and fatigue, certainly, but also movement and persistence woven throughout.
The album’s strength lies in that refusal to simplify its subject matter. Choosing not to present war and displacement as distant ideas, Sheykh Forever focuses on what remains afterwards: memory, guilt, inherited damage and the struggle to keep moving through it all.