Biography
47 Soul, a Palestinian-Jordanian group, independently originated the shamstep genre by merging Dabke with Western electronica on their pioneering 2015 debut EP Shamstep.
The four members who assembled in Jordan in 2013—Tareq Abu Kwaik, Ramzy Suleiman, Walaa Sbait, and Hamza Arnaout—drew principally from hip-hop, electronica, and R&B before blending those styles with the instrumental traits of Dabke, the Levantine region’s longstanding folk dance. Their 2015 delivery of Shamstep simultaneously supplied the genre’s name and introduced Levantine traditional music to listeners who had previously overlooked it. Once the outfit relocated to the U.K., the members issued their first album, Balfron Promise, in 2018 and then embarked on live dates and festival appearances. Recording for the follow-up album began the next year. At the opening of 2020 Arnaout exited the lineup, leaving the remaining trio to release Semitics late that year in collaboration with Lowkey, Fedzilla, and Shadia Mansour.
The four members who assembled in Jordan in 2013—Tareq Abu Kwaik, Ramzy Suleiman, Walaa Sbait, and Hamza Arnaout—drew principally from hip-hop, electronica, and R&B before blending those styles with the instrumental traits of Dabke, the Levantine region’s longstanding folk dance. Their 2015 delivery of Shamstep simultaneously supplied the genre’s name and introduced Levantine traditional music to listeners who had previously overlooked it. Once the outfit relocated to the U.K., the members issued their first album, Balfron Promise, in 2018 and then embarked on live dates and festival appearances. Recording for the follow-up album began the next year. At the opening of 2020 Arnaout exited the lineup, leaving the remaining trio to release Semitics late that year in collaboration with Lowkey, Fedzilla, and Shadia Mansour.