Manchester four- piece Maruja are an inconceivable force that have been sweeping the UK and parts of Europe for the past few years, cementing themselves as one of the most compelling acts on the radar at the moment. Nearing the end of their extensive Autumn tour, they decided to finally grace their presence at Nottingham’s Chameleon. The Mic’s Alice Beard sat down with the band to discuss all things live shows, the next wave of music and how everything so far has come to be.
Maruja have spent long years pouring themselves into their music all in an effort to perfect their craft. What has transpired from this hard graft is a collection of tightly- wound, captivating pieces which demonstrate the dedication to their cause. They remain just as spellbinding onstage, unremitting whispers of their splendour and skill perpetually floating around the underground circuit. There is a reason for such hype around the band, garnering intense reactions from fans wherever they land themselves, but as Joe explains to me, they are still not quite used to the response.
“We just played shows around Macclesfield for years and no one would turn up so it’s quite the change from those days. Over COVID we were working very hard and reaping the benefits! In Europe we've been getting people crying at shows, people of all ages connecting to the music, which is what we want. We just had a London show and someone was saying that it was the most diverse crowd they’ve seen in a while, which is a very good sign of things to come hopefully. We want everyone to connect with what we're doing”.
Harry further asserts this sentiment, “It's amazing to have a reputation like that. When we do perform, we really give our everything. We're super passionate and we're not afraid to be vulnerable onstage and just be ourselves. And I think that people respect that, and that's why people love giving us that tag”.
A night with Maruja is surely always set to be a raucous one, but for such high intensity gigs one might imagine it must be difficult to rouse all of that energy before a performance. Luckily though, bassist Matt has just the solution.
“We have a ritual that we do. I'm not sure if it works, but the four of us take turns to look into each other's eyes, and just do like an ‘ohm’, which is very calming. Not very energised. It works to calm the nerves to be fair.”
Joe jumps in here, “it sounds calming, but when it’s happening before a show it’s not calming!”
As I’m jokingly assured by Harry, this ritual can get quite intense, “It's nice to stare into each other's eyes as well. Really connect, get some strong chemistry going”.
The band all join in together now, chuckles emanating from the room as they recount their routine: “After a bit, it’s intense like ‘what you looking at?’ Then you look for another thirty seconds and it’s like ‘That’s what you’re looking at! That’s beautiful’”
On the topic of live shows, Maruja have been lucky enough to score gigs across both the UK and much of Europe as of late. One particular highlight of their extensive spread remains to be Paris, when the band played at Supersonic’s Block Party.
“That was wild! It was absolutely packed, loads of people were screaming the lyrics. Going abroad and having that is a really cool affirmation”.
Jacob further builds on Harry’s admiration for crowds overseas, recalling a gig they did in the days following at London Calling in Amsterdam.
“We were on fairly early, like half past three in the afternoon, but it was packed. It was like five-hundred people. Again, there was loads of people at the front, jumping, shouting every single word the entire time. Having that experience abroad is always crazy because we’ve not been to these places really that much before and having that connection wild”.
It’s always exciting for bands on Maruja’s level to be securing such a wide spread of venues, and as Joe credits, it’s thanks to their booking agent that the band have been able to do so.
“The only shows that we do now, really, are the best small capacity venues in each city. Like Paradiso in Amsterdam, for example, which is really historic. We’re just playing the buzziest, best sounding venues everywhere we go. It’s such an amazing starting point for every show. We feel, wherever we’re going it’s such a positive vibe for the whole night”.
Harry uses this opportunity give a quick shoutout to Mother Artists and in particular, James.
"When we do perform, we really give our everything. We're super passionate and we're not afraid to be vulnerable onstage and just be ourselves. And I think that people respect that"
We soon get onto the discussion of how their music has come about over the years. The confidence and rawness of Maruja’s live performances is something which surely cannot be distilled, yet the band have managed to flawlessly capture that essence in their recordings. As Joe explains, at its core their music comes from improvisation. Although they might not be running around onstage when the band are coming up with new ideas, that spirit and energy remains persistent.
“I think the energy that we play with has always come from the music that we're playing. Our producer Sam, as well he’s the goat! We've got such a tight working relationship with him now and he's just helped us for years develop the sound that we want to get from recordings”.
Maruja’s ability to translate their sound will be continuously impressive to me. Being ruthless in cutting down long jams into more digestible, condensed songs is what makes their sound so uniquely spectacular.
“We’ll often improvise from anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour and a half and then we'll collectively listen back to these pieces of improvisation. For example, The Tinker off Knocknarea was just a five-minute segment out of a forty-minute jam, and then we kind of just took that and said let’s translate that in the studio. We hadn’t rehearsed it or anything, we just jumped in the studio. We figured out our parts and then crafted it in studio”.
Other times the band might pick up on certain sections or riffs which stood out and then start to build around it for ideas. “It kind of comes in different formats but it is all usually spawned from improvisation, first and foremost”.
All of this talk soon lands us on the discussion of their most recent release One Hand Behind the Devil. This newest offering is yet another intoxicating track added to their collection. What begins with a feverish build is a song which promptly snaps into action. There is no doubt it is a track which possesses a dark intensity, an unfamiliar sense of foreboding hanging over the piece. The band have recently discussed the themes of mental health that will be explored within their next project, and although this single is not specifically about this topic, its heavy atmosphere is certainly a reflection of things to come.
For Harry, One Hand Behind the Devil is poetry. “The art of poetry, in a way, is to say what can't be said, through metaphors or similes and painting a picture”.
For the band’s upcoming work however, the overriding theme is “definitely mental health. Our track after One Hand Behind the Devil is called The Invisible Man. And that is about my dealings personally with mental health and those around me that have suffered. A lot of it to me is like therapy. When I write lyrics like this, it helps me understand things. I feel like it alleviates certain stresses that I find build up in me. I feel a lot more free after writing. I feel like that’s starting to translate now, I'm kind of just honing in on my own style of lyrics. So, I think those messages naturally come across”.
"When I write lyrics like this, it helps me understand things. I feel like it alleviates certain stresses that I find build up in me. I feel a lot more free after writing"
I ask then, if their next project is going to be a continuation from their debut EP Knocknarea and that seems to be the case. With the writing process spanning from pre COVID up to the new phases for their next project, Jacob feels there is some thematic overlap.
“They’re all written around a similar period of time, similar emotions. In that period of 2019 to now, the world's got into a more extreme, more volatile state and I think that continuation is of that angst and a feeling that we are able to show in Knocknarea, but it's just more exaggerated now”.
In terms of genre, Maruja seem to have traversed a whole spectrum. They’ve had a lot thrown their way, most commonly being referred to as post- punk, psychedelic or even jazz- punk, but they make it clear to me they want to avoid being categorised in this was as much as possible. The reason, as Matt explains, is they are so different musically from a lot of the categories generally used to describe them that it becomes difficult to place them. The term ‘post- punk’ is one that sticks out the most when it comes to the band, but Harry makes it clear he cannot see the association.
“It’s like somebody hears some spoken word and says ‘that’s post punk’ but no, it’s just a vocal style. The music isn't representative at all really. I think that people just use that term a lot because it’s easy to describe things like that”.
Joe follows up in agreement, suggesting that because post- punk has emerged in such recent revival, the association between any upcoming band with this category seems to be an easy and natural one. Regardless, he hopes they will escape this association in the near future.
“The post-punk scene is dying. When I joined about six, seven years ago, coming up from Manchester it was all Indie. Jimmy's bar was really prevalent. Lots of people trying to be the Arctic Monkeys and still the hangover from Oasis. Now post-punk has kind of become as diluted as the indie scene was back then. Everyone’s trying to do the same thing. I'm sure there'll be another scene in four or five years that will be like, ‘Oh, this is well cool’, then in another two years we’ll be saying, ‘everyone sounds the same now’. It’s just the way it goes”.
However, the one thing that holds Maruja as a separate entity is their ability to cross into new territories with every piece they undertake. Hopefully they will never be too tightly labelled, and this is largely thanks to the reliance on improvisation for the sound they produce.
“I don't think we'll ever really be categorised into a certain scene because we don't even know what we're gonna come up with half the time. But the main running theme with all of our new songs is a sound or feeling that we haven't had from a song we've done previously before. So it's never all going to be on one scene or one bracket, because it's always going to be a big conglomerate of loads of different genres”.
Following on from this debate, we naturally find ourselves considering the music ‘scene’ in Manchester. In the past, the city has witnessed the rise and fall of many great bands and played home to multiple iconic ‘scenes’, but of recent years I feel it has slowly but surely faded out. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but an observation I’ve made that has been hard to ignore. This is certainly a sentiment Jacob agrees with, too.
“As Joe was saying, six years ago it was such a massive hangover of Oasis sounding bands, Courteeners sounding bands, and Verve sounding bands, and people that are just wanting to sound like the classic indie Manchester sound. Luckily, I think, along with post-punk leaving, there's actually a good group of artists that are coming out of Manchester that aren't doing indie or post-punk stuff, which is interesting and exciting. That in itself will hopefully spearhead a nice new generation of music where people can go to the city without wanting to just have post-punk, where there's actually an individuality amongst our peers and our generation”.
Harry develops by further touching on the problems which have riddled the Manchester scene for years.
“After big bands of the 90s came through, a lot of money hungry individuals moved into the city trying to make money out of young aspiring musicians. It just got filled with a lot of hot-headed greedy promoters that ripped off young aspiring musicians, which meant that they couldn't reinvest in themselves, and therefore a downward spiral ensued. And therefore, we were not able to build any kind of scene”.
Of recent years however, it has become more evident that there is a glimmer of something exciting beginning to take shape.
“There are some cool promoters that are coming through and there are some great bands that are coming through in the past year or two. So there is the beginnings of something that I’m starting to spot, but it's still very much in its foetal stages”.
There is certainly some great talent beginning to emerge from the cracks, so naturally I ask the band who they have on their radar. They quickly jump up to point at the wall, to which I see ‘Teeth Machine’ scrawled across in black marker. This woozy five- piece, who we had all seen at Dot to Dot about five months prior at this very venue, are a great band to get the ball rolling. On the topic of Manchester artists, the band are eager to provide me with an abundant list to explore and enjoy, which I’ll provide below. It’s more than enough to fill your boots!
DRIVERS (catch them at SOUP in Manchester on 2nd December)
On that note, I feel it’s best to thank them for the lovely chat and leave them to it; they’ve got their pre-show ritual to do, after all. It was a pleasure to speak to Maruja, their confidence and dedication to their work as clear as ever. If you haven’t already, please go and listen to their Knocknarea EP, you won’t be disappointed. Don’t forget to keep your ears peeled for their next work and if you get the chance, get down to one of their shows- but do it sooner rather than later.
Alice Beard
Edited by Alice Beard
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