Ahmed Gallab, best known as Sinkane will be releasing his sixth album, He’s Gone on February 26, 2027 through City Slang. Entirely self-produced, engineered and mixed by Gallab, the album features collaborations with Yo-Yo Ma, Mdou Moctar, Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Annie & The Caldwells.
Whereas 2024’s We Belong was an exuberant communal effort, conceived as a love letter to Black music and made with a large cast of collaborators, He’s Gone takes a different approach: Written after the death of his father, the album reflects on grief and how it surfaces in memory, faith and family. The forthcoming album sees Gallab allowing himself to sit in the discomfort of loss without letting it consume him. The album begins with the Istirjāʿ from the Qur’an: “Indeed to God, we belong and to Him we return” — words of surrender and faith traditionally spoken upon hearing of a death. And from there, the album follows grief not as a straight line towards resolution, but something unruly and at times, unpredictable. It disappears and returns — sometimes at the most inopportune and strangest times. It changes shape. It can coexist with joy, movement, love, and a deep groove.
Since the release of We Belong, Gallab followed in his parents’ footsteps, becoming a university professor, teaching music appreciation, theory and songwriting. And while making the record, he found himself inadvertently following his father. At the core of He’s Gone is the things we’ve inherited without noticing — the gestures and ideas that survive people; the moment when grief reveals that someone who has departed is still very much present in the way you think, work, teach, listen or even more through the world.
The album’s cover art features Ibrahim El-Salahi’s celebrated painting Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams I, used with the permission of The Tate and the artist’s family. El-Salahi, was not only one of the defining figures of modern Sudanese art, he was also a friend of Gallab’s father, continuing to add to the album’s overall themes of memory, family, history and the like.
“Making the record gave me permission to grieve and, eventually, became a kind of catharsis,” Gallab says of the album. “I thought I was making an album about losing my father. Instead, I started finding him and, ultimately, myself.”
Arguably one of Gallab’s most personal albums to date, the album sees him blending Sudanese pop, West African music, dub and Brazilian and Caribbean influences. The album’s first single “So It Goes.” feat. Mdou Moctar derives its title from the refrain that follows every death in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, drawing from the novel’s central premise that all moments in time exist simultaneously, making death only one moment among countless others in a person’s existence.
Sonically featuring a strutting groove, skittering beats and stabs of shimmering keys, “So It Goes” is a breezy and ebullient blend of Afrobeats, Eastern African music, dancehall and contemporary pop beneath Gallab’s breathy falsetto. Mdou Moctar contributes a woozy and expressive guitar solo fed through layers of distortion and haze.
“After my father died, I found that strangely comforting. Maybe being gone doesn’t mean every version of you is gone,” Gallab says. “I wanted the song to feel like an East African psychedelic fever dream. “I asked Mdou Moctar to play the guitar solo, and he took it somewhere wonderfully unexpected.” The song gradually swells with a brightening sense of optimism and acceptance, viewing death as but a small part of a life. And it’s all underpinned by the joy of knowing that person was — and still is — a key part of your life.
“There’s something beautiful about a song about death feeling so full of life,” he adds.
