Ahadadream’s debut album P ★ K I pulls UK club pressure and South Asian roots into one record

Ahadadream has released his debut album, P ★ K I, through Island Records and Dialled In Records. The 11-track record gathers the rhythmic language he has been developing across UK funky, house, grime and bass music, while putting his Pakistani background much closer to the centre of the album than a standard club LP would usually allow.

The guest list is wide without feeling assembled for reach. Capo Lee appears on Put That Banger On Next, Eliza Rose joins Hyper, Jamakabi and Dismantle link on Left / Right, while Skrillex and Priya Ragu return on TAKA. The opening track, Tere Bin, works with material from the late qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, immediately setting up the record’s movement between South Asian musical memory and contemporary club production.

A debut built around drums rather than one fixed genre

Ahadadream’s records have long been held together by percussion more than by strict genre rules. UK funky is a constant reference, but his tracks also pull from gqom, garage, breaks, house and grime without flattening those forms into a single hybrid style. On P ★ K I, that approach becomes the album’s organising principle: drums change shape from track to track while the low-end and vocal phrasing keep the record tied to club use.

That makes the album read differently from a collection of previously successful club tools. Make Space and Put That Banger On Next already had lives of their own before the LP arrived, but the surrounding tracks place them in a broader sequence. Sea with INVT and Stupendously with Jolie P and Lamsi move the record through different rhythmic densities, while Stage with Sidd opens out the palette before the second half becomes more vocal and collaborative.

Tere Bin puts heritage at the opening of the record

Opening with Tere Bin is a strong structural choice. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice carries a cultural weight far beyond electronic music, and using that material at the front of a debut album makes Ahadadream’s Pakistani heritage part of the record’s foundation rather than an occasional sample or visual reference.

The move also connects to a broader strand of Ahadadream’s recent work. His productions have increasingly brought dhol patterns, South Asian vocals and UK club percussion into the same space. Earlier this year, Bass Dhol with Skrillex and Raf Saperra made that direction explicit; P ★ K I develops it across an album-length format rather than centring a single crossover track.

The collaborations map his club network

The UK connections are just as specific. Capo Lee brings grime cadence into Put That Banger On Next; Eliza Rose, another artist whose work moves between DJ culture and songwriting, appears on Hyper; Dismantle and Jamakabi give Left / Right a line back into bass-heavy London club music. These are collaborators who fit the record’s rhythmic world rather than guests placed around it.

TAKA, with Skrillex and Priya Ragu, sits near the end of the sequence and is the clearest connection to Ahadadream’s international rise. The track had already demonstrated how his drum-led production could scale without becoming generic festival music. On the album it lands as one piece of a more local and personal picture.

Dialled In is part of the album’s context

The co-release with Dialled In matters because Ahadadream’s work has developed alongside the platform’s focus on South Asian artists and club culture in the UK. Island provides major-label distribution and reach, while the Dialled In connection keeps the album linked to the community infrastructure around which much of this music has grown.

That balance mirrors the record itself. P ★ K I can move through larger festival systems and streaming platforms, but its musical details still point back to UK club rooms, diasporic radio, sound-system pressure and the producer networks that shaped Ahadadream before the album arrived.

For a first album, the useful achievement is not that Ahadadream has covered every sound attached to his DJ sets. It is that the record has enough rhythmic continuity to hold those references together without sanding down the differences between them.