The Adept by Lord Spikeheart

Around the world, people struggle for freedom and self rule every second of every day, and this struggle must indiscriminately exhaust all options for its expression. The new album The Adept by Lord Spikeheart violates all genre boundaries in its ruthless exploration of all of these potential expressive avenues, uniting extreme metal, hard techno, and rage hip hop into a sound that fully attains its own identity. Honoring Lord Spikeheart’s great-grandmother, a war hero in the Kenyan struggle for independence, each track brings in new sounds and new collaborators to unlock further outlets for communicating the same core of anger and disgust at a deep history of injustice. Though the album unifies under an umbrella of immense techno percussion and growling grindcore vocals, other tracks feature aggressive rapping in local languages, influences from noise music, and trap-influenced auxiliary percussion. Seeing the same outrage shouted by so many voices in so many languages and inflections brings to light the universality of the message, revealing the extent to which colonialism has scarred so many of the world’s cultures.