Lord Spikeheart

Booking Agent: Ricky Biondetti & Federico Zanatta

Over the past decade vocalist Martin Kanja, AKA Lord Spikeheart, has become a figurehead of the burgeoning Kenyan metal scene: first with frenetic speed-core group Lust of a Dying Breed, then to international acclaim as part of the now defunct industrial duo Duma, cultivating a distinctive blend of guttural yawps, screeching screams and gravelly rap verses that seep menacingly through head-banging instrumentals.

Recently released via his HAEKALU records, Africa’s premiere label dedicated to dark and heavy music, Lord Spikeheart’s debut album The Adept is an incandescent new frontier in extreme music critically acclaimed from prestigious media outlets such as The Guardian, Pitchfork, BBC Radio, Arte, Dazed, The Fader, NTS, Crack, Die Zeit and The Quietus.

Kanja’s vocals pull from death metal tradition, his guttural growls and hellish snarls a portal for a maelstrom that knows no borders; its clouds gather mutated footwork drumlines that beat at the pulse of a recently severed vein, possessed electronic noise-rap, and nu-metal nods that never feel like throwbacks as much as trebuchet-strength tosses forward into the future. 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.

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