Sinkane Announces New Album He’s Gone: Hear “So It Goes” (Feat. Mdou Moctar)

Ahmed Gallab, the Sudanese-American multi-instrumentalist who records under the name Sinkane, is coming back with a new album. Out in February, He's Gone is a more somber affair than 2024's celebratory We Belong, written after the death of Gallab's father and delving into heavy themes of memory, family, and loss.Although it boasts collaborations with Yo-Yo Ma, Mdou Moctar, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and Annie & The Caldwells, Gallab produced, engineered, and mixed the album entirely on his own. "Making the record gave me permission to grieve and, eventually, became a kind of catharsis," he says. "I thought I was making an album about losing my father. Instead, I started finding him and, ultimately, myself." Lead single "So It Goes," which features the great Tuareg desert blues guitarist Mdou Moctar, was named after the fatalistic refrain that accompanies every death in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and borrows the novel's central idea of all moments in time — past, present, and future — existing simultaneously. "After my father died, I found that strangely comforting," Gallab says. "Maybe being gone doesn't mean every version of you is gone. I wanted the song to feel li...