Mahmoud Hesham has been making music out of his home studio in Alexandria under the SHELNZ name since at least 2021, when his debut “All Colors” established him in the electronic and house world. “Those Days”, released at the end of 2025, is a significant left turn – a fifteen-track instrumental record that trades the electronic framework for something soaked in 1960s classic rock aesthetics, analog textures, and cinematic atmosphere. It’s a rare thing to find coming out of Egypt’s music scene, which is largely dominated by pop and electronic production, and the ambition of the project is worth acknowledging before anything else.
“Hey Duck” sounds like an extended musical interlude off Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin – it really evokes that era of analog sounds, while “Cannaregio” is rooted in jazz and bossa nova textures, though it’s more like an ambient loop with some spacey melodies floating on top. It’s like jazz for studying, so the harmonic simplicity on display isn’t what you’d expect when hearing those textures, but that’s where SHELNZ’s identity comes through. He is an EDM artist at heart, so the creative approach of loop then adding melodies is very much present here across the board.
Some tracks that stand out more than the rest are “Reasons Unknown”, “Golden Daze of Summer”, and “Deep As The Ocean”. The first two, because rhythmically they are dynamic, as opposed to some other tracks where the drums were kind of static, which negatively impacts the momentum of a song. While the last one offers some very interesting sound design choices to reflect the oceanic soundscape in audio form.
The tension in “Those Days” is ultimately the tension of a producer working in a new vocabulary while thinking in his native one. The 60s rock references are genuinely felt rather than decorative, but the underlying logic of how the music is constructed still belongs to someone who came up in loops and layers. For some tracks, that creates friction. For others, it produces something genuinely interesting – a hybrid that neither a purist classic rock listener nor a standard EDM listener would arrive at on their own. The album has reportedly found an audience in Chicago and Los Angeles underground scenes, which makes sense. That’s exactly the kind of listener who would appreciate the experiment on its own terms.
