Montreal, CA · melodic house

Sultan + Shepard

1 festival played →

Grammy-nominated melodic house veterans in their warm, patient era — journey-built sets with pop-writing pasts, melodic arcs that breathe.

Sultan is Ossama Al Sarraf, who grew up in Kuwait, Cyprus and Egypt before moving to Montreal in 1996 to study engineering and business at McGill University, where he became immersed in the local house scene. Ned Shepard, also a McGill student, passed him a demo CD in 2002, and the two began producing together as Sultan + Ned Shepard, later shortened to Sultan + Shepard.

They founded Harem Records in 2008 to release their own work, building an early reputation in progressive and electro house through singles such as Walls, featuring Quilla, No Good, with Fedde Le Grand, In the Air, with Morgan Page and BT, and When We Were Young, with Dillon Francis.

Beyond their own records, the pair have written and produced for other artists, co-writing and co-producing David Guetta's 2014 single Bad and co-writing Tegan & Sara's Drove Me Wild, from their 2013 album Heartthrob. They have also worked with Tiësto, Junior Sanchez, Vassy and Nadia Ali.

Their remix of Bruno Mars's Locked Out of Heaven earned a Grammy nomination for Best Remixed Recording in 2013, and Almost Home, featuring Nadia Ali and IRO, was nominated for a Juno Award for Dance Recording of the Year in 2018.

Their later output has moved toward slower, melodic house and downtempo, with long-form releases and sets built as gradual arcs rather than sequences of peaks. Warm synth pads, restrained percussion and vocal fragments recur throughout, and much of this material has appeared through Anjunadeep.

Read more

melodic house