‘People think it’s just for emo or gothic kids’: the Kenyan metalhead leading a new wave of African rock
As a teenager, Martin Kanja spent countless late nights listening to heavy metal on a local radio show. The furious riffs, shrieks, growls and distorted sounds drowned out his angst. “What drew me to the music was how it was so ‘physical’ – very present, very now – there was no space for negative thoughts or feelings,” says Kanja, who soon decided he too wanted to be a metal artist.
In 2010, when he was 19, he left his home town in Kenya’s midwestern city Nakuru for the capital, Nairobi, figuring it was his best bet for a foothold in the underground scene.
Fourteen years on, Kanja, AKA Lord Spikeheart, is a veteran of African metal, redefining the boundaries of the genre with the experimental sounds of his debut solo album, The Adept. The album, released in April through his new label, Haekalu – the first in Africa dedicated exclusively to the darkest and heaviest music genres – is a tribute to his great-grandmother Muthoni wa Kirima, the only female field marshal in the Mau Mau anti-colonial uprising, who died last year.
Kanja, 33, says he wanted “to honour her legacy and what she did for the country, and to appreciate all the struggles [the Mau Mau] went through in the fight for independence, so that their names can never be forgotten”.
Political themes run through the album. Using heavily distorted lyrics and sounds, from muffled screams to high-pitched squealing, Kanja expresses anger over the everyday oppression he sees across the continent, such as land inequalities originating from the British colonial era, China’s debt-trap diplomacy, and exploitative resource extraction.
Researchers trace African metal back to the 1970s, but in many countries on the continent, it remains on the periphery because of its perceived associations with satanism, aggression and drug use.
“Metal has always been a minority in the world – people just hear the growls or the screams and they are scared of them, but for me the lyrics and sounds are like poetry or literature, addressing real issues you can relate to,” says Kanja. Behind the heavy and aggressive sounds of his music lie messages about empowerment, self-actualisation and social consciousness.
Until recently, Kanja performed as part of the band Duma (“darkness” in his native language Kikuyu), which he formed with the Kenyan guitarist and producer Sam Karugu in 2019. The duo gained international traction for their manic industrial metal that disregarded traditional rules of the genre, touring cities in the US and Europe.
Kanja’s new album borrows from that chapter, challenging the boundaries of metal through collaborations with artists in different genres such as trap, hip-hop and noise, particularly those experimenting in their own fields, including the American rapper Fatboi Sharif and the Japanese producer Saionji BBBBBBB. His