Ahadadream: a decade of DJ sets, finally on record
Ahadadream's debut turns more than a decade of London DJing into eleven short, rude tracks of UK funky, bass and grime. He built it to behave like a set.
BY JOLT Staff · SEP 19 2026 · 4 min readAhadadream has been DJing since the late 2000s and has only now made an album, which turns out to be the correct order of operations. P K I, pronounced Pee-Star-Kay-Eye, is eleven tracks and about thirty-six minutes of UK funky, bass and grime built like a set rather than a songbook. Nothing about it sounds like a producer's first long player: it sounds like someone who has watched floors fill and empty for more than a decade and knows when to move.
His name is Ahad Elley, he is a London DJ and producer, and the career is longer than the debut suggests. He started putting on his own events at university more than ten years ago, moved them into the Blueberry in Shoreditch, then Plan B in Brixton, which is now Phonox. The rooms he came through include FØRGE and Foundry in Sheffield, both small: "Grassroots and smaller venues is where I learnt to hone my craft," he has said. He was at Bloc in Minehead in 2010 when Roska played, the night Roska handed out copies of his Essential Mix, and one of his own first releases landed on Roska's label, Roska Kicks and Snares. In 2017 he started More Time Records with Sam Interface, he runs Dialled In, and SHERELLE is one of the artists he has championed.
“I wanted to make an album which is a reflection of my DJ sets and distills the energy of my curation, as well as the stories of my experience into a body of work.”
P K I arrives on 18 September 2026 through Dialled In Record and Island, and it is a debut in the strict sense: the records before it were EPs built on the same sound. This one was a collaborative record, and the features come from Capo Lee, Jolie P and Dismantle. What he wanted from it, he has said, is the booth: a record that holds the energy of his DJ sets and the stories of his experience in one body of work. The other half of the brief is identity. "The album is first and foremost a personal expression of self-love and finding pride in my own identity," he has said.
The sound is gritty and rude in the specific sense those two words carry here: UK funky drums, real bass weight, and grime doing structural work rather than guesting on a verse. Nothing is dressed for a crossover that is not coming. The record moves the way a set moves, so momentum does the job a chorus usually does, and the handoffs matter more than the hooks.
Tere Bin opens it and does the work of an introduction, which is a harder job on a record like this than it sounds: a way in before the pressure arrives. Make Space is where the album states its case out loud, naming different ethnic backgrounds, the LGBTQI+ community and others who have spent enough time being left off the list. It is the clearest three minutes here, and the one that explains the title's swagger.
After that the record mostly behaves. The track that tells whoever holds the aux to queue it next does exactly that, and the album follows its own instruction to the end. Hyper, Left / Right and Stage promise pressure in their titles, and the grime spine supplies it. Bapbapbap and TAKA, which closes the record, are built on syllables you could spell out for a drummer.
It sits next to Roska, Redlight and DJ Zinc, and in the same London as SHERELLE, Jyoty, INVT and Lamsi, which is to say it is for people who listen to sets rather than playlists. Drivers, gyms, anyone with a folder of tools they trust. If you need verses, a bridge and a chorus that lands on schedule, this is not your album.
The flaw is structural, and the same thing makes the record work. An album built like a set treats its best idea as one track of eleven. Make Space is the one place the self-love and the pride are actually spoken, and it sits third, after which the record goes back to moving. That is deliberate sequencing, but it means the album's most quotable thought is also its easiest to miss. Short runtimes keep everything tight and nothing overstays, though little in the second half digs in on a first pass either.
None of that stops P K I from being the record it should be. He has said he always wanted to release albums and wants to release many of them across his career, and this one makes that a reasonable plan: it arrives after more than a decade of small rooms, it knows what a floor needs, and it will not sand down the parts that are loud, or rude, or hard to fit into a genre tag. A 4, earned the slow way.
