Maruja, ‘Pain to Power’ Album Review

Maruja Pens a Love Letter to Solidarity on Pain to Power

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I heard “Look Down On Us” for the first time at South by Southwest in March, when Maruja turned its instruments up so loud that businesses at the opposite end of East Cesar Chavez could hear the four men wail, “Free, free Palestine!” It was nearly a 10-minute rapture of jazz, post-hardcore, rap, and spoken-word poetry. The Texas crowd ruptured into a mosh pit—parted down the middle by saxophonist Joe Carroll, who swung his instrument at phone cameras and puffed into the mouthpiece like a breathalyzer. In the center of the chaos writhed a shirtless Harry Wilkinson, whose sweat wept through his pink board shorts and into his sneakers. He sang about late-stage capitalism and ushered a few dozen through “reflection[s] of the times we live in.” “Look Down On Us,” in the Austin heat which lapped against my burning back, was grotesque and visceral, vibrating between critique and solidarity. Wilkinson shouts the song’s title through a head-splitting medley of sonic struggle, telling us to “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.”

Maruja—Wilkinson, Carroll, Matt Buonaccorsi, and Jacob Hayes—has been playing together for 11 years, forming in the doldrums of Manchester just before the Conservatives regained parliament majority. The band’s 2024 EP, Connla’s Well, called to mind Gang of Four, Popol Vuh, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor via space-age, krauty blends and splashy post-punk renders. Jazzy textures taste the same frequency as blown-out hardcore firestorms, especially on a song like “The Invisible Man.” Connla’s Well, like Knocknarea before it and Tir na nÓg after it, feasts on a listener’s energy, with raging music that careens through fits of sax, thudding drums, and unsettling, incongruent guitars. Maruja’s style is an intense and compelling entropy; they are, by all metrics, a symphonic, crushing band inspired, in almost equal measure, by Herbie Hancock, Swans, and Kendrick Lamar.

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But Maruja’s EPs can only carry a listener so far, even if Tir na nÓg was just one unending swish of death-rattle woodwinds and profuse, apocalyptic singing separated on a tracklist by arbitrary titles only. On the band’s long-awaited debut LP, Pain to Power, the song-building unfolds like a series of grieving mini-suites, as disillusionment and spirituality sit at odds with one another in these grand musical gestures of empathy and relevance. Maruja extrapolates history by resisting annihilation, tyranny, and the consumerism that currently preys on vulnerable people. The ongoing extermination of Palestinians and the ongoing massacre in Gaza both anchor the album, as do images of a global migrant crisis, failing healthcare system, and rising authoritarianism. “We may sound angry, but our message is one of peace,” Wilkinson tells every crowd he meets. The feral and loving atmosphere of Pain to Power is a revolution hewn by a faith in unity and illustrated in simplistic, recurring motifs. As “Reconcile” goes: “We are love in abundance.”

The straightest song on the album is the first one, “Bloodsport”—a thrashing guitar song until it isn’t, when a brief pocket of Carroll’s saxophone summons a rap tangent from Wilkinson (“They don’t like us when we’re shining, they remember what they lost / Shame so strong, wanna wash away with blood / Blood calls blood, will we ever bleed enough?”). Self-love is contagious, he reckons, but it “takes courage to recognize our own flaws.” Images of overdose, health insurance corruption, and complicity in “the narrative of pacified killings” paints Maruja’s idea of social apathy. “Still afraid of what we love,” Wilkinson belts out, “and that’s a heavy truth.” For ten minutes, “Born to Die” reckons with humility, communication, possession, and ego, contending that “our species overcomes through perseverance in the mind, our dreams are a reminder this realm ain’t the only kind.” Here, the crux of Pain to Power awakens: What is a life worth? “We are universal spirits,” Wilkinson wagers. “And our kingdom is this earth.”

Intensity is warped by impulsive and improvisational clatter, and it’s at its most traumatic on “Break the Tension,” as Wilkinson yells, “Can’t make a difference, can’t stop the feeling,” over bursts of sound interlaced through four instruments that sound like twenty. The dissonance of “Trenches,” cuffed to a frenetic punk scaffolding, presents itself through Carroll’s concussive saxophone zigging in one direction and Hayes’ cauterizing drum kit zagging in another. Wilkinson quotes socialist revolutionary Fred Hampton (“No revolution if you don’t think you’re a revolutionary”) and wages war on tradition (“Challenge every culture, set heights without a limit. Evolution sculpted by the hands of perseverance. Generations healing, the love had been oppressed”) in his cypher, before reflecting on masculinity “(Men are young but they’re reckless”), organizing (“Solidarity is never unattainable”), and human ignorance towards God (“Threw us into chaos, never mind who had bled”).

Irish mythology spawns into “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. Maruja turns “Saoirse” into a demand for humanness and liberation, as Israel’s genocide of Palestinian people remains ongoing. In a press statement, the band wrote, “This is a song for peace, an outpouring of grief and a refusal to be numb to what we are seeing. Genocide. Man-made famine. An attempted erasure of a people.” The band was inspired by a comic strip found in Carroll’s Irish grandfather’s belongings: a member of the Black and Tans boarding a boat from Dublin to Palestine. Wilkinson, while thrashing phrases of woodwind, bass, and percussion collapse into him, sings one thought over and over: “It’s our differences that make us beautiful.” But his voice never raises into a yell, simmering only in “Saoirse”’s rally for unionism.

Pain for Power is overwhelming but never threadbare, packed with colossal brass, elastic diatribes, and tourniquet rhythms. There is a moment on “Born to Die” when Wilkinson’s voice snares into a falsetto, nearly shattering like Clare Torry’s 52 years ago. Later, the instrumental “Zaytoun,” a name that translates to “olive tree” in Arabic and is that of a British non-profit that supports Palestinian farmers, crests into radical gentleness when Wilkinson’s guitar starts burning like a synthesizer. And, as the “pray for love” outro of “Reconcile” melts into Carroll’s twisting saxophone solo, Wilkinson’s ferocity erodes until all that’s left is a fist raised both in courage and in defiance of colonialism. “I have no fear,” he promises. Maruja isn’t one of those loud-quiet-loud UK bands everyone’s been buzzing about; instead, their climaxes rot like ulcers, festering in ribbons of noise and passages of blood-curdling jazz until the blisters pop. If music is the universal language, then let us all be fluent in this one.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

Maruja Pens a Love Letter to Solidarity on Pain to Power

Paste Pick: The Manchester quartet’s long-awaited debut album is a feral and loving atmosphere calling attention to world crises. The songs are overwhelming but never threadbare, packed with colossal brass, elastic diatribes, and tourniquet rhythms.