The debut solo album from Martin Kanja, the Kenyan artist known as Lord Spikeheart, is an incandescent new frontier in extreme music. It’s an arena Kanja has fought in with gladiatorial fierceness as half of the now-disbanded Duma, but The Adept is bigger, glossier, and even more punishing. 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 — 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. — Jordan Darville
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