Lord Spikeheart

Kenyan vocalist and producer Martin Kanja aka Lord Spikeheart, has become a figurehead of the African metal scene cultivating a distinctive blend of guttural growls pulled from the death metal tradition, screeching screams and gravelly rap verses that seep menacingly through head-banging instrumentals. His debut solo album ‘The Adept’, released on his label HAEKALU Records, Africa's premiere label dedicated to heaviest music from the Continent, has acclaimed widespread recognition from prestigious media outlets such as The Guardian, BBC Radio, Pitchfork, Arte, Dazed, The Fader, NTS, Crack, Resident Advisor and The Quietus, captivating audiences globally from East Africa to the rest of the world as a new frontier in extreme music.

Kanja’s debut solo album surpasses the might of his past work by several degrees. Listening to it feels like moshing in the Mariana Trench, being hurled by the currents through liquid darkness. - Pitchfork

The list of collaborators is an inspired one — Cardopusher/Safety Trance, Fatboi Sharif, Brodinski, and Backxwash are some of Kanja’s guests — but The Adept never feels like anything less than something only Lord Spikeheart could have made. It’s the sound of an atom of the soul being split, unleashing an eldritch new energy. - The Fader

Allow yourself to sit in this chaos and you may begin to feel strangely liberated, as if screaming into a raging wind or, like Kanja himself, harnessing a prodigiously expressive power. - The Guardian