Sheykh Forever Lights the Dancefloor in the Ruins on Fire in the Master’s House

Iraqi-born Mostafa Al has spent the years since his 2022 album ummi refining Sheykh Forever as a London-based project that fuses disco, heavy rock and hypnagogic indie pop under a thick layer of funk. Headline shows and festivals followed, along with anti-war singles such as Run for cover, Sleeping Dogs and Where is my baby?. Fire in the Master’s House arrives as the fuller statement, fourteen tracks written, produced, mixed and mastered entirely at home over four years on Forever Records.

There is an old idea, carried in certain oral traditions, that when the master’s house catches fire the people who have lived under its roof do not only run. Some stay long enough to move in the courtyard while the beams fall, taking the heat as something that now belongs to them. The image feels remote from a London home studio stocked with vintage hardware and digital tools. Yet it sits near the centre of what Al has made. The album treats the house as both the place that can be taken and the place where the body keeps its own time, even as war and its aftermath press against the walls.

The sound rests on a continuous tension between dark electronic texture and organic pulse. Deep, elastic bass lines lock with hypnotic rhythms that shift from the measured breakbeats of trip-hop into tighter funk-rock and dance patterns. Synthetic arpeggios, manipulated vocal samples and night-time reverb sit against chamber elements: velvet piano, dramatic strings, sharp rhythm guitars. The production gives the record a cinematic weight. Verses stay relatively dry and close. Choruses open into wider, almost choral space. Al has described the emotional core simply: “I feel a lot of darkness and urgency, and that has never changed.” That urgency is audible in the way arrangements refuse to settle, carrying the residue of conflict into the groove itself.

I’m your history opens with vinyl scratches and processed voices before dropping into a steady downtempo groove. The refrain returns to the threat of dispossession: one day someone will come, take the home, and speak as if the singer does not already know the history. The track holds its temperature through repetition and a warm synthetic bass, leaving the final vocal push to carry the refusal. Ghosts! answers with a more theatrical surge. Reversed vocal fragments give way to a rubbery funk bass and dry drums. The voice moves between near-speech and sudden high jumps, the delivery shifting as if the body is still trying to stay upright under pressure. The lyric keeps the conflict close, fists leaving marks, a love that cannot be respected, then widens to a land of holy hypocrisy where the house can still be set alight.

Saviour brightens the palette with nu-disco bounce and a female lead that rides a straight dance kick and elastic bass. The chorus lifts on the repeated claim that it is all right, yet the verses undercut the shine with material indifference and the line “I’m not your dog and you are not my bone.” The contrast is precise. The body is invited to move while the words keep their distance from any easy resolution. Lineage (Where is my baby?) splits the difference. Its first half is glitchy and cybernetic, low synthetic frequencies and fragmented percussion. The second half opens into the repeated question that will return later, a voice searching for someone who cannot be located. DNA and lineage appear as both inheritance and the weight war leaves behind.

Eyes is the album’s longest and most unstable room. It begins in chamber space, strings and soft piano, then breaks into distorted guitars and heavy drums. A harpsichord-like timbre and brass dissonance push the middle section toward something closer to dark cabaret. The voice travels from a tender address (“You are so beautiful / Your eyes are like rain”) into rawer territory and a spoken monologue that names the dismantling of a family home and the cruelty of mankind. The close returns to a quiet, almost parental count that tries to put a child to sleep. The suite does not resolve the damage. It stages the shifts that war forces inside one continuous piece of music.

Later tracks keep the same pressure under different surfaces. BROKEN uses industrial weight and darkwave synths to set an urban claustrophobia against the question of whether the place is heaven or hell. Sleeping Dogs leans into neo-soul warmth, electric piano and round bass, while the lyric asks for a reason to fight and points toward the place where the sleeping dogs lie. Same disease drives harder on synth-pop and electropop, the refrain locked on the inability to let the shout out, then the repeated claim that dead or living it is all the same disease. The track turns the shared damage of war into a pulse that refuses to slow.

(the guilt) sits lower and more spoken, a neo-soul groove under lines about the guilt that is made and the happiness that is stolen. The closing spoken section turns the reflection into a statement of limited power: all that can be done is work on the self. Where is my baby? returns the title question in a cleaner dark synthpop frame, voices answering each other across the same absence. Another thing coming pushes into dance-punk abrasion, guitars cutting against a funk bass while the chorus warns that the matter is not finished. Fields… builds from slow strings and a descending glissando into saturated synths and drums before dropping back to the strings alone. The lyric stays inside an open-air prison, the world spinning below and out of reach.

The album ends with Here comes the rain (Pt. I). Dark drones open the piece. A linear electronic beat arrives, then gives way to warmer keyboard figures that carry a gospel-tinged lift. The lyric moves from the river to the burning olive trees, from the bodies that line the streets, into the promise that the rain will wash it away. The final invitation is communal: take your brother by the hand, tear down Babylon, return to the thunder and the rain. The track does not erase the fire or the war that lit it. It places water after it.

Across the sequence Al keeps the personal and the political in the same room. History, lineage, the threatened house, the missing baby, the disease that does not distinguish the living from the dead. War is never named outright, yet its pressure shapes the displacement, the ruined structures, the search for what has been taken. The production never treats these as decoration. The groove is the means by which the weight is carried, the heat that remains after the beams have fallen. Fire in the Master’s House understands that the body can still keep time even when the structure that once held it is burning. That is the record’s clearest achievement.