Highpoint by iKD Band

Highpoint is the second release by iKD Band, following Edge of Time (March 2022) , the first new album from South African punk legend Ivan Kadey in over a decade. With the collaboration of Warrick Sony — a legend in his own right — these albums offer up two new cycles of original songs that reach across Kadey’s entire career as a songwriter and musician, from the late 1960s to the lockdown culture and the resurgence of global protest movements of the more recent past.

Kadey was a founding member of Johannesburg’s groundbreaking multiracial punk outfit National Wake, whose very existence was an illegal act of resistance against the Apartheid regime. Their eponymous 1981 release is a sharply political record that added the music of South Africa’s black townships to the standard punk-reggae mix of the era— and is now considered a rediscovered classic, reissued in 2013 on the anthology Walk In Africa (Light in the Attic). Warrick Sony is the mastermind producer behind Kalahari Surfers, the Cape Town-based art-punk agitprop collective that released a string of six deeply subversive albums (available on Bandcamp) through the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Both artists were introduced to a new generation of fans by the 2012 documentary Punk In Africa, and National Wake is the subject of a new, full-length documentary in 2022, This is National Wake, which makes its debut this June at the UK’s Sheffield Doc Fest.


The songs on Highpoint come from various periods across Ivan Kadey’s career as singer-songwriter. The songs feature a number of like-minded guest musicians, many also émigré South Africans of the same generation, while also adding additional elements to the sonic palette – Hofner bass, sitar, saxophone – and an increased presence of female vocalists. Building on Edge of Time, the songs are rooted in a highly attuned political sensibility formed over time, shaped by the experience of the South African struggle, but alert to the problems and challenges of the contemporary United States, where Kadey now lives. Many of the songs here are more introspective and personal, often based around highly individual themes and specific moments in time, forming a sort of companion piece to the more topical and contemporary protest songs found on Edge of Time.

“I’ve never really stopped writing songs...since I was 13 or 14. I always wrote songs...I had this drive,” says Kadey from his home in Los Angeles, where he has worked as an architect and recording studio designer for the past three decades. “Architecture has always been my means of earning a living, but music has always been a part of my being and my most immediate form of expression. These songs come out of different streams. Some are more political songs, some more rooted in stream-of-consciousness...but they almost exclusively start out on the guitar, with me playing around with riffs and chords, finding a motif that is evocative. The words come to me, things that have been on my mind, what is going on around us. They come from the heart.”

The album’s first single, “Chief Joseph” explores the connections between South Africa and the U.S. through the lens of anti-colonial resistance. The song pays homage to Chief Joseph, or Joseph the Younger (birth name Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt,), an indigenous Nez Perce freedom fighter who resisted colonization and removal by the expanding United States in the Pacific Northwest. “Chief Joseph made an impression on me as the last Native American leader to resist the encroachment and onslaught of the US government during the 19th century,” Kadey says. “Not just militarily but in a cultural sense, tribal in the best sense, almost familial. The song is about my roots, all of our roots, and how the struggle hasn’t really changed in the past fifty years.”