Awe, I fear, is a terribly fading feeling. I go to gigs here in Los Angeles and half the time they’re just rooms of folks paying 15 big ones for a can of beer and watching sets through their phone cameras. Maybe that’s just what live music is now, or maybe I’m just going to the wrong shows. But in October I wound up at the El Rey Theatre—a swanky place near the Miracle Mile with carpeted floors, so good luck getting your pack of chewing gum past security—witnessing an exhaustive presentation of a live set I’d only previously seen in a sample size, when Maruja, a post-rock, mid-noise, pre-jazz band from Manchester, played Paste’s South by Southwest event six months earlier and turned a timid crowd of Texas daydrinkers into an over-capacity fire hazard.
Maruja played loud enough in March to get the attention of some BBQ patrons two blocks over. Vocalist and guitarist Harry Wilkinson, flanked by saxophonist Joe Carroll and bassist Matt Buonaccorsi, stood at the helm of the pit with a fist in the air, like some devilish, sweaty monolith. Chants of “Free, free Palestine!” soon vibrated into the streets and courage became this potent, living thing. Six months later and Maruja, near the end of an inaugural run of West Coast shows, smothered us Angelenos in songs from their newly-minted debut record, Pain to Power. Wilkinson, dressed to the nines in graphic-print athletic shorts and beat-up sneakers but no shirt, covered his head with a keffiyeh and called for the liberation of Palestine, rejecting any and all fears of consequence in the face of doing the right thing—because, as Carroll tells me, “sacrificing a message that needs to be talked about during a time like we’re in now seems so ridiculous.”
But Wilkinson wasn’t always the sweaty and shirtless guy doing pushups at the top of “Break the Tension,” Buonaccorsi says, instead donning “a leather jacket and a lovely, slicked-back quiff that was very John Travolta-like” when they were young. Wilkinson and Buonaccorsi have known each other since attending the Manchester College together, where they formed Maruja at age 16, naming themselves after a Spanish storefront. The chemistry, they tell me, was instantaneous, but their sound—a contagious and dissenting pocket of blown-out jazz-punk—hadn’t quite sorted itself out yet. “But the creativity was always there,” Buonaccorsi elaborates. “There was always a spark within us, and that drive and passion for music that really binded us all together. And it binds me and Harry closer than ever now.”
Carroll arrived at Maruja’s rehearsal space in Stockport, which he calls a “big, old industrial mill,” for the first time in 2017. “I was like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’” he recalls. “I’d never been to a band practice before, and it was these four guys in really loudly colored Adidas tracksuits and hoodies—just all proper stoners.” The space was full of “passionate and engaging” dotted-around sessions where the quartet would drink tiny beers, which they all affectionately call “chodes,” that you can get ten of for two quid. Drummer Jacob Hayes, who’d recently moved to Manchester, took over on the kit a year later, after his housemate Jack introduced him to Wilkinson, Buonaccorsi, and Carroll at one of their shows. “I wanted to pursue playing in bands, doing more improvising and jazz,” he says. “Watching [Maruja], it was just more fun and weird and interesting than other things around. And that’s what we find interesting today, innit? The strangeness and the ability to make strange sounds happen is a fun thing.”
That strangeness comes from Maruja’s tried-and-true collaborative approach—a real “whatever you’re playing, I’m there and I’m playing it with you” type of assignment. It takes a lot of intraband encouragement to arrive at such brutal, cathartic places, Wilkinson suggests. “We’re pushing each other into new ideas, and we’re showing each other new pedals, really trying to push the boundaries together.” Having a diverse music taste certainly helps, as transmissions from Kendrick Lamar, Swans, Herbie Hancock, Little Simz, Knocked Loose, and Death Grips unfurl across Maruja’s records, as do cloaked attitudes of 140 and drum ‘n’ bass. “I don’t know why we get so much pleasure from hearing such nasty noises, but that is very prevalent in all of our mindsets,” Wilkinson wonders. “We really do try to keep our minds open to all genres and not put down anything just because it’s charting. We try to keep our ears open and listen and be perceptive to what we are being given. Whether it’s music or politics, friends, your family, love, war, death—it’s all used as fuel.”
The aggression on Pain to Power comes from a failing healthcare service in England. And the aggression on Pain to Power comes from late-stage capitalism devastating the United States’ working class. And the aggression on Pain to Power comes from Israel’s ongoing extermination of Palestinian people, because, “as much as we want people to come together and unify through love and solidarity, we also want people to come together and show some fucking angst and have a revolutionary mindset to combat the powers that be.” Learning from Nina Simone and Alice Coltrane, Maruja began approaching their art like performance therapy, using 8-minute worlds of intense and beautiful music to free themselves from the pain festering within until it’s all just “love in abundance.”
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MARUJA RELEASED FOUR MINI ALBUMS between 2019 and 2025, including the great Knocknarea EP in 2023, which Buonaccorsi considers to be the band’s “actual debut record,” because it was “the side of our music that we were most passionate about.” In that 6-year span, Maruja wrote, recorded, and discarded full albums and EPs—developing a live show that became a must-see, word-of-mouth phenomenon in the process. But behind the scenes, they were finding themselves in studios with too many promoters whom they disliked. “We didn’t realize, at the time, that they were ripping us off and ripping off all the other young, aspiring artists that were growing up with us,” Buonaccorsi reveals. “Playing the long game has that benefit. You know how to use your nose to find the people in the industry that see you as a cash-cow kind of thing.”
“It’s an unfortunate truth that you run by, and I think that bands, if they make it quite big, [they go] almost immediately into a debut. They don’t really have that experience, or they don’t have a manager to bring them along and help guide them. You need mentors and all that to really help you find your calling within the industry and know what you’re doing. I think that’s why a lot of bands that blow up big end up crashing eventually, because it’s become too big way too quick. We’ve had that time to know what’s best for us.”
Pain to Power had no starting point, because “Born to Die,” an ancient song in the band’s personal history, took years to develop before reaching its bombastic, gargantuan final form. But Carroll suggests that “Look Down On Us,” this grotesque, 10-minute medley of jazz, spoken-word, and post-hardcore ruptures, was the first glimpse of the band finally “pushing everything to the fucking max, spritually.” It’s also one of the best songs of this year. After finishing the bubbling, sprawling violence of last year’s Connla’s Well and the 4-act, atmospheric deluge of this year’s Tir na nÓg, a 50-day tour in the fall of 2024 left Maruja “absolutely shattered,” setting a precedent of burnout for the four of them, Buonaccorsi remembers. “We were mentally, physically, and spiritually exhausted.” Upon returning home, they were given about 1.5 months to write and record the rest of Pain to Power. At Low Four Studio in Manchester, that time-crunch spawned tracks like “Bloodsport,” which was written in two hours after the band listened to a 10-second clip of a “crazy loop and a drum roll” on either Wilkinson or Hayes’ cell phone; “Saoirse,” this collapsing, rallying demand for liberation during Israel’s genocide of Palestinian people; and “Zaytoun,” a radical, gentle instrumental companion to the forthright and defiant conclusion in “Reconcile.”
Most of Pain to Power’s saga is improvisational clatter—frenetic, grinding punk riffs, saxophone tapestries, cauterizing drum fills, cypher raps, and self-care spells all wrapped in human impulse and scraped up vocal cords. It’s unpredictable but not devoid of entropy. Maruja views the exercise as some kind of telekinetic bond, because it allows the foursome to be greater than the sum of its parts, latching onto an energy that isn’t of this era but entrenched in human experience and intuitive trust. “There’s a thoughtlessness that resides within a true flow state. It’s like a meditation,” Wilkinson explains. “Our favorite bits of the jams come up often when we’re deepest in that flow state, where we’re not overthinking, we’re not judging parts or anything. We’re locked in and we are becoming one. Our four minds interlink, it’s fucking terrifying, bro.” Carroll says that, after the band completes an improv jam, none of them remember a lick of it, because it taps into “something that you know there aren’t any words for. They’re just fucking sounds, and some of it is so palpable and suffocating and traumatic.”
Buonaccorsi concurs, detailing how, during every session, Maruja places a cell phone in the middle of the room and just hits record, hoping to preserve whatever awakened their instincts: “We create a giant singular mind, and we don’t remember any of it. We feel crazy exhausted after it. We have to go outside and enjoy what fresh air there is in Manchester. It’s only until later somebody will put on our private sound world and it will just blow our minds. It all comes back to us, the bits where the magic was, where we’re somehow creating this alien energy. I don’t know how to describe it, it leaves me speechless.”
“It’s deeply moving and emotional, and enlightening as well,” Wilkinson chimes in. “One jam might start really beautifully and pretty, like you’re walking through a forest or something, and then all of a sudden the JCB starts coming in and tearing that forest down in front of you.”
“Deforestation,” Carroll adds, nodding.
“Yeah, I don’t know about all that, but it’s definitely along the lines,” Wilkinson snickers.
Maruja jam in rehearsal like they play on stage, Hayes says, bringing the Kevin Garnett Boston Celtics jersey that he’s wearing closer to the camera. Knocknarea came out the way it did because of COVID-19 lockdowns. “You couldn’t play shows, we just had to sit inside and continuously jam for hours,” Hayes says. “We don’t know any other way other than just giving 100% of our energy into the thing that we’re doing. A jam could be 20 minutes to an hour and you’re just in this cathartic chaos.” Maruja transported that energy into their live shows, filling rooms with a delicate poingnancy that, under just the right crack of light, could dissolve into harsh abrasiveness—“cutthroat chaos mixed with compelling love to one another.”
WHEN MARUJA FORMED 11 years ago, Manchester’s music scene was still nursing a hangover from its Oasis-induced Britpop stupor. Even now, Mancunian dads still blurt out, “What the fuck’s a saxophone doing in a rock band?” upon hearing music that would sound more at home on the Windmill’s stage in London. Carroll took a few lessons as a kid but the traditionalist shit never did much of anything for him, so he eventually put the instrument down. “But then I ended up doing this music course in college,” he reveals, “and I came across some really beautiful, open-minded people.” Among those people was Mikey Thomas, a friend who painted the Pain to Power cover. “He introduced me to loads of cool music that really opened my mind. Playing with other young musicians gave me that feeling that I’ve still got today. It was a real connection with love and respect.”
Maruja put a saxophone in their lineup before it became fashionably English to do so, but Carroll believes his musical identity is adaptive more than it is innovative. “Maybe it was a bit weird, because no one else was doing it, but I was there. Any direction we went in with the band, I had to adopt. Otherwise, I’m not playing. If we ever go down a hardcore route, I’ve developed styles of playing the sax that fit that. If it’s really ethereal stuff, then I’ll change my setup a bit and do some more classical stuff.” For Carroll—whose role at shows includes parting crowds down the middle and using his instrument to build an all-consuming storm of restless moshing—being the best-trained player in the room doesn’t mean a thing if you’re not nourishing the whims of your bandmates’ jam. Hayes says that having a saxophone in the band makes the music “feel more demented” than it already is. “Zeitgeist” is an especially good example of that, when Carroll’s melodic blasts add a Swans-like abrasiveness to an already weird and noisy panorama, because the band’s producer, Samuel Jones, told him to “imagine a lamp down a well crying out for its mother” when thinking up his part.
The sound that Maruja has come up with is a feral and loving one—passion metabolizing in bookish self-help lyrics about wreaking havoc on colonialism and soothing the after-effects of its empires. The band feels deeply and passionately about the act of bringing people together through love and solidarity, combating man-made horrors by creating communities. “We’re just looking around us and it’s plain old destruction of civilizations and real people—an ongoing genocide,” Buonaccorsi says. “We need a more collective, general movement. Of course, within that, politics plays a role, but it’s also such a deeply inhumane travesty that it expands beyond politics.”
“Is there any resitance, or even hesitation, to letting anger be a part of your songwriting?” I ask the band. “Or, do you operate under the impression that being upset and being frustrated can be a gateway to unity?”
“It’s all spawned out of anger—spawned out of, like, ‘What the fuck are we seeing right now?’ That is creating a community that we actually feel like we’re becoming a part of. We’ve never had that community of music before,” Carroll responds. “When you’re witnessing such atrocities, that anger makes me stand up and be like, ‘What can I actually fucking do right now?’ It makes you assess everything you know.”
“We’re fucking pissed off on a regular basis,” Hayes gathers, “and you can see this is the same for an enormous amount of people worldwide. It’s a reflection of where we’re at.”
The live shows have become a mad extension of that oft-frustrating, inescapable reflection, as Maruja foster a concert environment that welcomes and encourages attendees to “turn their aggression into something that can be used to combat aggression.” By doing that, natural beauty often reveals itself in “people letting out their aggression at shows instead of letting it out when they get home,” Wilkinson says. “It’s to help people heal.” At the end of every performance, he asks everybody in the audience to raise a fist for solidarity. Most of them oblige. “And then you’ve got 1,000 people all holding their fists up in unison. And that simple act shows courage, and it shows that we are all of a similar mindset, and that just because we may have a difference of opinion doesn’t mean that we should hate each other.” Pain to Power delivers a warning: the culture needs an artist to remind their listeners that there is power and beauty within them, that they can stand up for the right things and “love each other and respect each other as much as they can with the resources that they have.”
When Maruja was developing their stage presence, Buonaccorsi would come so unglued on stage that his eyes would roll into the back of his head, turning him into a “demon monkey” in a “therapy ritutal of bringing out the pain that’s inside me from seeing all the fucking horror that’s unfolding.” It rubbed off on his bandmates, Carroll especially. “I was looking over and I was like, ‘This guy’s deeply entrenched in the music and letting it overcome him.’ I think that taught me and inspired me to do the same,” he elaborates. “We all let the music do that. When we perform it, it’s trying to embody the power of the music and how it’s making us feel and react in the most natural way possible. We do have that intense aggression, where we’re getting in front of people’s faces and we want them to fucking squeal. But then there’s other bits, where we’re looking deep in someone’s eyes who’s crying at the show, and we’re trying to pour love into them through the songs we’ve created together. It’s intensely human.”
“There’s parts where, Christ, even I’m crying on stage, losing the will to play the bass and looking at people’s eyes,” Buonaccorsi sighs. “As soon as I see someone cry, I’m like, ‘Yes this is what we’re here to do.’” The angry, frustrated, and hurting world has resided in Maruja for years, and now it’s bleeding into the people watching them expel. “That’s the healthy thing to do, to get it out and not hold it in,” Wilkinson reckons. “It’s where a lot of mental health crises have come from, by not being honest a lot of the time with yourself and with others around you, descending into the dark parts of the human psyche. We try to express ourselves as honestly as we can by just allowing the music to flow through ourselves and try to take that into everyday life. People can see us putting everything into it. They can see how honest it is. We’re not trying to do it through ego. We’re trying to be as down to earth as we possibly can be.”
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WILKINSON’S PERFORMANCE STYLE is inspiring. The language he speaks in is one of love and solidarity, in an effort to “remind people of the power that resides within themselves,” citing Jamie James’ book The Music of The Spheres and its depiction of music as a universal language as his manual for harmony. “Through performance, through our music, through our lyrics, we’re tyring to connect people in a world they feel disassociated from—and themselves from the land and from each other,” he says. “There’s a reason why people have become like that, and it’s because we live in a consumerist, capitalist culture which preys on people’s vulnerabilities. For that reason, it makes it much more valuable for production. If the inner-light in people is stifled, then they become much more malleable, much more easier to control.” Maruja debut album argues that life is not mundane, that people are not ordinary but the human embodiment of boundlessness. “I want to try, as best as I can, to bring people together in times of global oppression, through a medium that is spiritual,” Wilkinson admits, “because it seems to me like the only things left on this planet that are spiritual are music and love.”
So Maruja use their art to “try and transform” communities into revolutionaries that will stand up for the right thing, inspiring people to, hopefully, lend their voices to those without. They titled “Zaytoun” after a British non-profit that helps Palestinian farmers that gets its namesake from the Arabic word for “olive tree,” and they’ve mobilized their audiences against rising fascism by becoming fluent in the language of organizing. “It’s the artist’s job to speak truth in times where there is no truth,” Wilkinson reckons. “The artist has no hidden agenda, whereas politicians may have a hidden agenda. Businessmen may have a hidden agenda. Influencers may have a hidden agenda. Maybe it’s wealth, maybe it’s ego. The artist is just painting their truth, whether that’s because they’ve experienced suffering or because they’re in a culture or an environment that is asking that of them.” The songs suggest that hope is not yet lost. “External factors have created oppression, and that now is having a ripple effect through culture,” Wilkinson agrees. “But we can counteract that by putting our own ripple effect out through culture, which is spawned out of positivity, truth, and understanding.”
Maruja’s music lands somewhere between the political and the protest, powered by an emotional, empathetic response to annihilation and suffering. “Politics aside your left and your right, if you’re seeing what’s going on in Gaza, that’s an undeniable fact. That’s an atrocity. Human rights are being violated. That is genocide, that goes beyond politics,” Hayes explains. “If you’re emotional and you care about something, you should be opposing that. And that doesn’t matter what side of politics you’re on.” Wilkinson perks up, adding: “I think that’s why so many people are connecting to it around the world, in different cultures, because there are deeply empathetic people everywhere. We just get shown all the shit stuff and the dark side of humanity, because that makes us a lot more fearful and it makes us a lot more easier to control.”
There’s a line in the song “Trenches” that sums up Pain to Power, when Wilkinson spits about “generations cuffed by the ghosts of their past.” It’s especially compelling considering the crushing and all-consuming tyrannical state that’s expanded under Donald Trump’s leadership in the United States. But governments buckling under the pressure of authoritarian rule is not a purely Western bent. “It’s pretty fucking nuts to see that people who are meant to be in charge, those that we don’t trust already, are acting in such a selfish and cowardice way,” Hayes says, pointing to Ireland’s unwavering support of Palestine as a necessary template for rebelling and radicalizing against complicit, fear-mongering regimes in a post-colonialist, post-mandate culture. It drives Maruja to speak up. “It’s so appalling and abhorrent and obvious to us what’s wrong, what’s to blame. It seems mental to not highlight that, to have all the facts and ignore it.”
Maruja’s message is one of peace, and I return again and again to “Saoirse,” which translates to “freedom” in Irish Gaelic and became a cherished name during the creation of Saorstát Éireann (the Irish Free State) in the early 19th century. But under Maruja’s stewardship, “Saoirse” becomes a song that pushes back against the “attempted erasure of a people” by celebrating Ireland’s history of solidarity with Palestine. Carroll’s great-grandad was the first person in his Irish hometown to have a camera, snapping photographs that would, decades later, inspire the saxophonist’s fascination with his heritage’s relationship to mythology and paganism, especially when his dad fell severely ill during the recording of Knocknarea. “My grandfather was visiting a lot of the time,” he remembers. “In his dad’s photos, I found this comic book strip—it’s a guy boarding a boat on the way to Gaza from Belfast. It’s literally the same people that oppressed the Irish and have now gone over to oppress the Palestinians.”
These heirlooms became not only Carroll’s guiding light, but a reminder to the band that “the earth’s got everything you need. Everything you could want is here. All the answers are here.” Maruja’s poetry is commentary we bring with us into this sinister, war-mongering world. Pain to Power isn’t art disguised as activism or activism disguised as art, but an album of perspectives—of multi-generational diaspora tearing through the flesh of oppression. As they reflect the times we live in, I let the ritual of Wilkinson’s words be a guide, but some days an exorcism: “Put faith in love, be firm and loyal. In yourself, put trust. Be twice the ocean, be twice the land. Be twice the water for your sons and daughters.”
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Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.
