Sheykh Forever sets the dancefloor ablaze with new album 'Fire in the Master's House'

Sheykh Forever's 'Fire in the Master's House' is a rare political album that refuses to choose between confrontation and movement. Across its fourteen tracks, Iraqi-born, London-based musician Mostafa Al folds disco, funk, heavy rock, hypnagogic pop and electronics into a record built around war, displacement, propaganda and inherited trauma. The themes are heavy, but the music rarely stands still.

Tracks such as 'I'm Your History', 'Ghosts!' and 'Lineage (Where Is My Baby?)' push anger through restless, densely layered arrangements, moving between paranoid funk, warped pop and harsher electronic textures.

From there, the record keeps widening as 'Sleeping Dogs', 'Where Is My Baby?' and 'Run for Cover' turn urgency into rhythm, while 'Same Disease' expands the album's focus from individual suffering to the way violence is passed down through generations. On this track, war isn't treated as an isolated event, but as something that continues long after the immediate destruction has ended.

That's where Sheykh Forever's approach becomes especially compelling. Instead of using disco and funk as contrast for contrast's sake, he makes physical movement part of the record's resistance. There's something almost confrontational about making music this politically charged yet so rhythmically alive.

Written, produced, mixed and mastered entirely at home over four years, the album also has an impressively self-contained quality. Vintage hardware and digital tools are pushed together into arrangements that can feel meticulous one moment and volatile the next.

There are traces of artists such as Nicolas Jaar and Blood Orange in the record's willingness to blur genre and mood, but 'Fire in the Master's House' is most convincing when its influences disappear into Mostafa Al's own restless language.

This is anti-war music without the solemnity usually expected of it. Throughout, Sheykh Forever turns grief, anger and survivor's guilt into something jagged, funky and defiantly immersive.

The master's house is burning. And yet somehow, there's still a beat coming through the walls.