Jabo Bridges Belgian Rave Music With Arab Sounds in 'Speed Runner' EP

In Europe’s electronic music landscape, few genres have been as unfairly maligned as jumpstyle and tekstyle. Often dismissed as the uncool cousins of the European rave scene, they were relegated to suburban basements and campy YouTube tutorials from the mid-2000. One man is giving these harder styles a bit of a facelift, doing so with the sounds of the Arab world.

Five years after his last EP, Moroccan-Belgian producer, Jabo, returns with Speed Runner, an EP that feels like a nitro-boosted heist through the streets of Brussels and Casablanca. Building on the November, 2025-released single ‘Benzene Baby’ featuring Yazmina Gasolina, Jabo’s latest offering is an homage to the high-energy sounds of his dual heritage. The EP recontextualises them by injecting Arab synths and North African rhythms into the frantic DNA of tekstyle, alongside a campy sense of humour that refuses to take the seriousness of modern electronic music culture at face value.

The EP’s title track, ‘Speed Runner’, is a three minutes-plus of controlled frenzy, an uptempo club weapon that pairs hard-hitting drums with a relentless arpeggiator and cartoonish vocals, embodying the playful energy that originally defined the jumpstyle era. If the title track is the fun, frantic race, ‘Shuka’ is the crash. Acting as the title track;s more aggressive counterpart, it pushes the listener into raw, abrasive territory, stripping away the camp to reveal a darker, more industrial foundation. Closing out the journey is the Yalla Soundsystem rework of Jabo's previously unreleased track ‘Hafla’, which is arguably the most potent example of the EP’s spirit, merging traditional Moroccan time signatures with the bouncy, high-gravity energy of jumpstyle to create a sound that is as much a celebration of heritage as it is a peak-time banger.

With Speed Runner, Jabo shows that any bygone genre can be raised from the dead if you have the vision to reinvent it. The EP doesn't reinvent the wheel - but it does add some unmistakable North African seasoning to genres that are best described as loud and goofy.