FEATURE: Spotlight: Maruja — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Tom Oxley for NME

Maruja

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THIS month…

this amazing band have some dates in the U.K. They get to play home crowds. Playing Crash Records in their native Manchester on 15th September, they then head out to the U.S. and Canada, before they return to play dates in the U.K. and Ireland. Even though the band formed back in 2014, I think now is a real moment of excitement where they are getting on the radar of some big sites and sources. Maruja are a quartet consisting of Harry Wilkinson (vocals/guitar), Joe Carroll (saxophone/vocals), Matt Buonaccorsi (bass) and Jacob Hayes (drums). Their incredible and hugely popular music combines elements of Jazz, Post-Rock, Noise Rock, and Spoken Word. Their lyrics blend themes around the socio-political whilst addressing and tackling subjects such as mental health. Their hotly-anticipated debut album, Pain to Power, will be released on 12th September. It was “recorded at Low Four Studio and produced by Samuel W Jones, who the band worked with on their three EPs to date. The extraordinary collection not only confirms the four piece as a creative force of nature but finds a deeply emotional and empathetic band concerned primarily with the power of community, both in the nuclear sense, as a tight knit creative unit, but also as a wider force for social and political change in the age of the individual”. There are some great new interviews with the group that I want to take parts from. They are a hugely important force for good who use their voice to speak out and support those in need. Saoirse is a moving and powerful song for peace shared in solidarity for the people of Palestine. So many reasons to love Maruja and throw your weight behind them!

I am going to start out with an interview from CLASH that was published back in March. This was released around the release of their E.P., Tir na nÓg. The final part of a trilogy of E.P.s, the band ended 2024 with a huge run of gigs. One of the most exciting and exceptional live bands in the country, they were looking ahead to a possible debut album. We now know that this is a matter of days away:

“It’s been an extraordinary year for Maruja, from the offer to play Glastonbury off the back of an interview with Tom Ravenscroft and Deb Grant on their New Music Fix show on BBC Radio 6Music, to playing in 25 countries, releasing ‘Connla’s Well’, playing Ireland for the first time and of course (perhaps most notably) signing for Music for Nations towards the end of the year, the independent record label owned by Sony.

They have grafted at their craft and decided to take the plunge over a year ago, quitting their jobs and spending a month in a house writing music together. They then immediately went out on their first headline tour. Jacob makes the not unsurprising observation that “we struggled to make money, and we put records on sale for the first time. But this year it’s been more comfortable. We’re glad we made the decision to take a financial loss last year, to focus 100% on the music, because the things that we’ve been able to do this year wouldn’t have been possible without the set-up of last year. You really knuckle down all the business things and really understand how vinyl works and merchandise and selling, and touring and how all of it works. Each of us now know it.”

For Maruja the live performance is integral to their very being. It’s an exhilarating experience to see the four-piece on stage, and their audiences have been growing quickly over the last 18 months or so, a testament to their work ethic. Their music goes from the extremes of chaos and mayhem to calm and quiet, Harry and Joe getting into the crowd, wiping up the mosh-pit, which is not usually required to be honest.

Whenever they play in Manchester the reception goes through the roof. Two nights at The White Hotel were extraordinary last spring, the walls dripping with sweat and the electricity in the air palpable. Harry shares: “Playing to a home crowd with us all living and being from Manchester, people go even harder because they know that we’re from there. It’s been a while since a band has come up through Manchester and has been like making waves as we have. So I think there’s a lot of people who are very excited for us as well, and they want to be a part of that movement. And it’s a beautiful thing to see, is to see us bring together so many different groups of people.”

“We were chilling with our boys after the show and they were saying, “Nothing gets everybody out like a Maruja gig. Nothing brings all the friends together like a Maruja gig.” And I thought that is great symbolism. Somebody asked me the other day, what does Maruja mean to you? Maruja means family to me, you know, I’m saying these are my family. And that’s the values that we reflect, solidarity, you know, and that’s the message we have. So whenever we play Manchester, there’s a overwhelming sense of pride in community.”

Joe added: “Until the music starts, and then it’s just unadulterated carnage!”

Looking forward to 2025, Maruja kick things off with the EP release before heading to North America for their first headline tour across the pond, including a prestigious SXSW slot. As a matter of fact, the New York show had to be upgraded such was the demand for tickets. Matt shares: “It’s just going to be a privilege, really, because we know that our fans over there are absolutely feral for us. We can see it on our social medias. They’re always like, come to Toronto, come to Baltimore, come to… I was about to say Bolton, but that’s England!” he laughs. “We’re all very excited, it’s going to be great.”

A debut album is in the planning, but for now the focus is on their North American trip this spring. One thing is abundantly clear, Maruja mean business. Prepare yourself North America, there is a whirlwind coming”.

IN THIS PHOTO: The cover of Maruja’s debut studio album, Pain to Power

Last month, The Needle Drop spent some time with Harry Wilkinson, Joe Carroll, Matt Buonaccorsi and Jacob Hayes. With news of an album coming, it was an exciting and interesting chat. I want to take from a part of the interview that followed on from the band talking about their 2019 E.P., Knocknarea, and how there was a darker sound. A Tory government who were tyrannical. COVID-19 was not far away, and there was this awful mood and feeling in Britain. That radically changed how Maruja wrote and looked at the world:

“So there was literally an ideological shift that everybody in the band was going through at the time that started to seep into the music and seep into the creative process?

MB: Yeah, sure.

JH: Yeah. What Matt was saying is, when we first discovered jamming/improvising when it was just us four, there was maybe a few moments where we first discovered flow state and subconscious communication. Artists out there that are aware of what flow state feels like will know what we mean, and it's a really obvious thing to us that what we were doing — creating music this way — was completely democratic, ego-less, and a way to just connect spiritually and emotionally through the music you're making. And it was just the most complete way of creating a song because there's no one agenda that you have to meet. You know one person presenting an idea. It's all just coming from within us. We just decided that was the only... That's how we're going to create music from now on. The themes that we talk about are just...We improvised all the songs, and then from that, we then tweaked them, added lyrics, and have shaped different structures from them. Previously — sorry, after having improvised it, those emotions that we feel is reflective of the times. Matt was saying about the Tory rule. We'd just gone through Brexit. We was having an increasingly more right-wing shift in politics, seeing lots of more blame on immigrants and migrant workers. And then, yeah, COVID happened. So it was really just an outpour of what we were seeing and living around us. And I think improvising is just a really pure vessel for translating those emotions into music.

You're talking about the democratic creative process here, but how exactly... I think we have an idea of how that manifests in conversation, but how does that also manifest when you guys are literally playing in the moment and maybe one of you has a random idea, and you decide to just throw it out there? You know what I mean? Is there a way of one person does something and everybody follows in their direction in the moment, and it goes from there? Or maybe something gets thrown out and it doesn't quite take, and it just gets thrown into the abyss and we're moving on to the next thing?

JC: Wow. Yeah, it's pretty accurate! We definitely like... With the whole democratic thing, once you get locked into that, there isn't as much thought as that, to be honest. And you don't really... Because it's equally about listening as much as it is about playing. You're so tapped into what else is going on that every decision you make is following or influenced by something that has come before it. Or, you might make a little accident, and you'll then follow that. So it's almost... It's less like, "Oh, I might throw this in here!" and it's more like, you're discovering together and pushing yourselves with the energy in the room. That has led to us exploring really unique ways of approaching our instruments or really unique ways of transitioning from a certain sound into another sound. And with that approach, it just makes everything feel so cohesive, even though it can be like, some of the wildest shit you've ever heard. It's still all in the same world and all perfectly fit in with each other because it's all spawned from each other.

Specifically Harry, because I want to know how your lyrics play into this part of the band's creative process. I mean, obviously, you guys have up until this point — and I'm sure we'll continue to emphasize the importance of improvisation and everything...Obviously, one of your most recent EPs was this hugely instrumental improvisation release. There was also that vault project that you guys dropped that fans seem to be loving the hell out of. But what mind state or planning do you guys go into when you make that separation between "We're going to do a jam, we're going to record something that's going to be completely improvised," versus "We're going to move into something that is completely premeditated, we're laying lyrics to it, we're laying a message to it, and we're really working out the structure and all of the finer details," and everything like that.

HW: Yeah, I think a lot of the time we create...So like the boys are saying, the music is spawned from improvisation when we are literally just vessels for creative energy to flow through us. At that moment, we'll take the jam, we'll listen back to it and be like, "Yo, this five minutes here is absolutely amazing. Let's take this for a song." And then we will tweak it, and we'll be like, "Okay, well, we could have a verse here. Maybe this is a place for a chorus," or, "This is a bridge," or whatever it is. Sometimes we'll literally take the jam and just reenact the jam exactly how it is, and it's instrumental, or I might then write lyrics on top of it. But often it's taking a jam and then manipulating it into a song format that is a little bit more digestible, essentially. I'll then take away the landscape that we've created musically, and I will add my lyrics/message on top, depending on the sonics and how that's making me feel, what that is displaying to me creatively. This is me in a place of like, "Okay, maybe it's about this topic, or about this topic!" It really depends on what that song is giving to me, the music that we've written, how that's affecting me emotionally”.

There are two more interviews that I want to bring in. The Quietus spoke with Maruja about their telepathic connection and their searing and unforgettable energy in the live arena which is replicated in their music. This connection between studio and stage. The Quietus note how there is solidarity on every note that Maruja play:

“That energy, that unified experience ravaging through the album, replicates their visceral live performances. It’s here where one can understand why Pain To Power feels the way it does. In their embryonic, improvisational stages Hayes says that tunes “reveal themselves in different ways”, often pulling, stretching, speeding up, and slowing down. In these moments, the roles of artist and audience overlap in fascinatingly spontaneous and sensory entanglements. Be it the immersion of the band in the pit of a live crowd. Be it the message of ‘see you in the trenches’ issued to those about to watch them perform before a gig. Be it the unanimously repeated mantra at the end of every gig Wilkinson initiates: “We wish you peace, prosperity and unity in these times of global oppression. Together we are stronger.”

If the medium is the message, Maruja’s message is clear. With the notion of community forever at the core, their aural bolt of sweat and flesh and scraps of clothing and calloused palms is a reactive force to be reckoned with. “Everything that’s gone on with Palestine Action,” says Wilkinson, “where a protest group has been turned into a terrorist organisation, shows the importance again of those safe spaces where people can release their emotions about the tragedy of what’s going on in the world, and protest. It is a place to protest and a place to show solidarity with each other and feel safe to be yourself around people that you maybe admire and that you connect emotionally with through their music.”

With a burning bullseye in sight, jazz, as Maruja grasp it, is less about genre, but more a yearning to breach certain emotional as well as sonic thresholds. As their music collapses into a concave of its own making, Maruja surpasses the physical realm as we know it, the result of a surge towards musical telepathy. “It’s those moments where we don’t need to be democratic about anything,” says Carroll. “The thing has been made. It’s more of a self-discovery than being taught in an academic way. There’s no sort of archaic depth to it. People like Miles Davis and Pharaoh Sanders are really big influences for us because you can really hear that, the way that they’re pushing the instrument and making these bizarre noises”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Samuel Edwards

I am going to end with some words from an NME interview published in May. I wanted to head back a bit before finishing because there are some sections of this interview that outline why Pain to Power might be one of the most urgent, important and, as we may discover, best albums of the year. I can see this gaining lots of five-star reviews from critics. If you have never heard of the band, then I would urge you to pre-order their album and support them as much as you can:

“A lot of themes on this album – and I mean stuff that the four of us, our generation and people across the world are experiencing right now – are about seeing so much turmoil, war, corruption, greed, horror through the screens of our phones,” the bassist told NME. “It’s easy to feel powerless when looking at all of this happening. Decades ago, you would have just heard about stuff like Palestine through the newspaper, but now the world is an open stage. We’re getting angles about all kinds of incredible suffering from different countries, different peoples.

“It’s so horrifying to try and take in all of this collective pain. The fact that we can try and turn this pain into power, into action, to come together to protest and form communities and celebrate solidarity and love over division – that’s quite powerful. ‘Pain To Power’ means to transform something that is making our lives so difficult and trying to change the world with that. The whole album is a study on that phrase.”

Ready to hit the road this summer ahead of their newly-announced dates across the UK, Europe, China, Japan and the US later this year, Maruja find themselves refreshed and inspired after a break following their recent and lengthy North American tour.

“It was wonderful,” said Buonaccorsi. “It’s a big culture shock going there, because it’s such a massive, grand place. Every single state, and in Canada, every single fan is lovely. There was a warm presence from them all and they were some of the most energetic and frightening crowds we’ve ever had. New York was just possibly my favourite show ever.”

Alluding to the ongoing debate and campaign around freedom of expression within music following Kneecap’s Coachella stunt for Palestine, Buonaccorsi said he felt encouraged by the engagement from their fans.

“With the discourse, we’re in very politically sensitive times for both our countries – probably more so for America right now,” he told NME. “It meant that on some level, we could really relate to the fans that we were meeting. For the fans that were coming down to our shows across the States, they understood that our message is very much to be wary of authoritarianism and how that can descend into all kinds of ugly places.

“America is having a tough time right now. All the fans that were coming down were the exact type of crowd that would cheer, go crazy in moshpits. We welcomed each other with open arms. We look forward to much more of that”.

I will end there. I am fairly recent to Maruja, but I am definitely converted. A band that are so essential and not only speaking to people on a personal and intimate level, but also at a global level. In terms of their words around Palestine and how they are part of a growing group of artists risking more than their careers speaking out against genocide and showing solidarity with Gaza and Palestine. Despite a career together that has lasted over a decade, I think that their time is now. Pain to Power could well be among the best albums of 2025. It will definitely elevate them to a new level. With a huge fanbase in North America, I wonder where else they will head. 2026 is going to be their biggest year I feel. Maybe a Mercury Prize nomination for them? Big slots at major festivals? Who knows! When it comes to the mighty Maruja and how far they can go…