Maruja

A couple of months after the release of the excellent "Pain To Power," Maruja's highly anticipated debut, and in anticipation of their only sold-out Italian date of the tour, scheduled for Santeria Toscana 31 in Milan, we took the opportunity to chat with the explosive Manchester quartet's bassist, Matt Buonaccorsi. From their recently released album, written and recorded in just under two months, to life on tour, to the current social and political landscape, with an eye on a more or less rosy future, Matt confirms that the guys really have a lot to say and, above all, a strong desire to tell and share their stories...

Hi Matt, it’s been almost two months since the release of “Pain To Power”, how are you and how’s your debut going?
We’re all keeping well here in the dark cold depths of England, taking things easy gig-by-gig on the album tour; ginger shots and yoga is the new rock ’n’ roll it seems. Even though it was half-written, recorded and produced in as little as a month and a half, “Pain To Power” really feels like it’s been 11 years in the making for us - It’s a dream come true, and a tough dream to achieve at that. You’re advised and told a lot that your first album is what makes or breaks you, so the pressure was certainly on in that small time period to get things right, and we could not be more proud of ourselves for pulling through and seeing such an anticipated album be so well-received by fans and critics alike. A crucial shout-out to Samuel W. Jones, our producer and best friend who has been at the helm of our studio sound ever since “Knocknarea”, working extra hard to make sure our sound is as soul-altering as it can be. The day we finally released the album was a pivotal day in our lives, you could really feel the sheer gravity of what was happening. Now it’s graftin’ time, and we’re currently half-way through the album’s tour, tweaking and perfecting the new set as we go, making it something truly special to behold. 

Among the underlying themes of the work are the transformation of pain into power, both collectively, like the resilience of the Palestinian people, and from the perspective of the individual, as well as the identification of music as a means of healing and unity. “Trenches” gets straight to the point from the very first verses, using terms like Indoctrinated pain and Generations cuffed by the ghosts of their past. Among the myriad ghosts and pains, more or less consciously “inherited”, that our generations find themselves facing, which do you think is the absolute worst?
There isn’t any one ‘absolute worst’. Saying that, I’ll leave it plain and simple to answer this: hatred. Palestinians have endured genocide for more than 70 years. When hatred can alienate an entire society to remain indifferent, and at worse actively celebrate the slaughter of innocent people - people who don’t even reach the age of 1 years old - there’s something deeply, deeply wrong happening. Hatred makes people everywhere look the other way when real evil is happening before their eyes. I will never understand how you can watch footage of children being crushed to death, and think of it as something ‘good’ or ‘necessary’, that’s a deep sickness, never mind an opinion. Hatred blinds us all.

Since “Knocknarea” you’ve gradually broadened your musical influences, increasingly incorporating rap-rock and metal, while remaining true to the concept of instrumental improvisation, largely free of genre labels, as expressed, for example, in “Zaytoun”. Did you have any sources of inspiration or were you listening to anything in particular while composing “Pain To Power”?
Real quick one on “Zaytoun”: That improvisational element has acted as the fundamental backbone of our writing style for a long time. It’s a method that predates even “Knocknarea” by a few years. That track, in particular, was that improv element in its rawest form, demonstrated on “Pain To Power”. It’s not as ‘developed’ per se as the other songs, but it’s the side of our music we’re most excited and eager to release to the world - it’s the heart of our music. Not to sound completely self-centred, but this method has always acted as our main source of inspiration. Saying that, you’re completely right on rap-rock and metal influencing us particularly around this time. Throughout the years beyond “Knocknarea”, Harry [Wilkinson] became more influenced and inspired by rap as a form of writing and vocalising his ideas - Kendrick Lamar comes to mind as a big inspiration. As an extension of that, we’ve always been fans of Rage Against The Machine (who’d of guessed!) and have always appreciated System Of A Down too, both very much direct in their political messaging, so Harry and the rest of us thought it necessary, now more than ever, to be as enraged and as direct as possible when making the message and the music of “Pain To Power”. In our minds, the world needs to be more enraged at the clear injustices our societies are facing. We also listened to “You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To” by Knocked Loose a lot at the time; we found the production and sheer power of the music quite jaw-dropping, overwhelming, and a perfect sonic looking glass into anger as an almighty force that can unite people.

The first time I heard “Look Down On Us” was live at Covo Club in Bologna last year, when you came to Italy for the first time in early October, and its structure struck me ever since. Could you tell us about the genesis of this track?
We loved the Covo Club show! One of our favourites of that entire tour last year. “Look Down On Us”, musically speaking, was birthed from a 40-minute improvisation we recorded on our phone, I think sometime last year. We were rehearsing in Brunswick Mill at the time, searching for ideas, and as soon as we started listening back to this jam, lightbulbs flared in our heads. We felt it necessary to write this song, there was something menacing and world-crushing about it, and the world itself seemed to be turning into a self-crushing menace. The first two verses and the choruses, again musically speaking, came from the original jam, and the calmer second-half of the song loosely came from another jam we’d done around this same time period. Even then, this was an unprecedented piece of music for us; it was the first time we’d felt a serious urge to write a song beyond the normal confinements of the single length, and for a while we’d deliberated on keeping it as exactly that - a short-form, rage-induced banger - until Harry started writing the lyrics, and we came to the idea that developing this apocalyptic explosion into spiritual catharsis was exactly what the song needed to separate it from the rest of our releases thus far. It made perfect sense for the core message: here’s why you should be angry, but let’s not end it there; here’s how we can start making change.

Speaking of concerts, one of your greatest strengths is precisely live performances and you were very keen to transpose that type of energy onto the album as faithfully as possible, highlighting the expressive and cathartic power of music, as mentioned previously and as can be seen in the closing “Reconcile”. What’s your relationship with your audience like, and how do you experience touring?
Appreciate the very kind words and the love for “Reconcile”, that’s a song that’s been a long time in the making. We’ve got a terrific relationship with our audience! It’s always a 50/50 effort at every show; the more energy and appreciation they give to us, the more that inspires and transforms us to push ourselves harder to our performative limits. We’re lucky to be blessed with fans who can both band together to let off some steam in the mosh pits and the walls of death, and also band together to let some deep-set emotions out and show love to one another - it’s the most beautiful, humbling experience in the world, and we honestly couldn’t ask for anything better. Experiencing touring is a whole other beast entirely. The shows and the fans are the unchanging heart of touring, but so is getting to explore new cities, new countries, new cultures, new cuisines, and better weather pretty much everywhere else compared to Manchester. There is an undeniably gruelling side to touring though, especially when it’s difficult to sleep properly, eat healthily, and if personal issues are occurring simultaneously with being on the road. When our paths have crossed, and when there’s been enough time for it, we’ve spoken to a few other bands and artists we admire, and hearing all their burnout stories is comforting in the worst way. Burnout is no joke. The extreme spikes of adrenaline and post-show comedowns certainly makes one a bit disoriented and devoid of energy, so you really have to make an effort to look after yourself, otherwise you won’t be able to fully appreciate all the aforementioned beauties of touring. However, this is a responsibility that is not for the artist to be held entirely accountable for - it’s an industry-wide problem that needs addressing. We’re not robots, we have natural limits, and those limits need to be respected, otherwise the artists this industry helps to foster will crash and burn left and right, and there won’t be any more tremendous and progressive music to change people’s lives.

Expressively, attention to imagery has always been a key aspect of your work, from the black-and-white and sepia photography of your previous works to the current intense red of Mikey Thomas’s emotive paintings. How did this collaboration come about?
We had already been good friends with Mikey for a while, Harry in particular had been friends with him in high school, and Joe [Carroll] had previously been in a college band alongside him. We hadn’t touched base in a long time but we were following his work on Instagram, and it wasn’t hard to sense that a mad genius was brewing. Harry ran into him numerous times on trains around Manchester, so they got to catching up with one another on life and our differing yet similar artistic paths. Next thing you know, the four of us are writing and recording “Pain To Power”, and we’re in search of a new style of artwork to accompany our maelstrom of sounds. We still had a huge variety of old photographs from Joe’s grandad’s collection, but for a while we’d considered switching things up - it was the start of a brand new era, so a brand new style felt adequate. We reached out to Mikey and he took us into his studio in Salford. A small white room fit for a mad genius, and looking at his art pieces, and listening to the way he described making them, and what he thought about them conceptually, it was all confirmation that he was exactly so. Initially he didn’t have time to make brand new art for us, but when we sent him over the album, something sparked inside him. Whilst our album was being mastered by the wonderful Katie Tavini, he started sending over drafts of what he was working on. Not once did we have to go back on something. Whatever art piece he came through with, it was a world of its own that we could explore - absolutely perfect for “Pain To Power”.

Is there a song on the album that you feel is more “yours” and that you’re most attached to? And if so, why?
It’s a very close call between “Born To Die” and “Reconcile”. I’d say “Born To Die” takes the cake by a small but significant margin. This song has been quite a long time in the making. We first wrote it two-and-a-half years ago, during a month away in a beautiful house situated in the meadows of south England. Around that time, Break the Tension was also being written, and we were diving into some seriously psychedelic improvisation, as well as the most maniacally insane free-form jazz with little to no traditional method to constrain us. It was a very freeing process, albeit with some hard discipline to get something written. From that effort came “Born To Die”, loosely based on a jam, of course. It was easily the most patient yet explosive song we’d ever written up until then, and it felt light-years beyond what we had already written and released. “This has to be on the album” I remember us all saying to one another throughout those busy years. We stuck to our guns on that statement, and so when we finally sunk our teeth into writing “Born To Die”, we could not have been more excited and proud with what we were making. When we listened back to the final product, it had already taken on the air of being our magnum opus, and that was testament to our willingness to push ourselves to create something daring. For that reason, it holds a very special place in my heart. 

Last summer “CASPER” was also released, a beautiful collaboration with Quadeca. What was it like working with him?
Although we didn’t work with him in a face-to-face sense, it was still such an immense privilege and honour to be able to work with him from across the great Atlantic barrier. Perhaps in the future, one of us lot can traverse that barrier and make an in-person collaboration happen. We were going back and forth with him on Instagram for a bit before he sent us a demo of “CASPER”, which we first heard after playing OFF Festival in Katowice, Poland, and our jaws were collectively bolted off and on the floor. Collaboration was a no-brainer, and it was already a behemoth of a track at that time, so we were desperate to, somehow, make it even more behemothic. We were in Salford University not long after, working with our producer Sam around the same time as our third EP, “Tír na nÓg”, when we set some time aside to each play and record some parts. We did what we did best and mostly improvised over the top, making sure we had the right tone and texture and that our parts developed well with the song, whilst Sam recorded and compiled all the takes and sent them to the man himself. Quadeca had some hauntingly beautiful lyrics already written for Harry, because he loved the idea of those lyrics being delivered in Harry’s voice. Our man happily obliged, but he also wanted to have a go at writing some of his own lyrics to help elevate the message and the themes, a prospect to which Quadeca was extra-excited about. Some brutal spells of touring later, when we heard back the final product, we once again completely lost our marbles. What an immense talent that man is. What an artist!

Are there any artists or bands you’d like to collaborate with in the future?
A plethora of rappers - Billy Woods, Danny Brown, loads more. As mentioned previously, and it goes without saying, we would love to work with Quadeca again. We loved “Vanisher” so much, it’s difficult to even find the words to describe what he created there. He’s a musically kindred spirit to us, and he has a serious knack for writing apocalyptic, mind-expanding sonic worlds, something we ourselves strive to produce all the time. Me and Joe were on BBC6 with Craig Charles recently, and he asked us, out of their artists of the year, who we’d want to work with. I said Geese, and Joe said FKA Twigs. Both are artists we’ve listened to a lot on the road, and both are artists we see as forward-thinking, groundbreaking, insanely creative, and unashamedly themselves. 

Emotion is contagious, see the domino effect flourish. Talking about the future, in light of the constant succession of global political and social events, what do you see?
If the gap between the wealthy elite and the everyday person wasn’t divided enough, we can only see it dividing further if the greed and power of said elite are left unchecked for the next few years, especially when you consider that world leaders like Trump have been openly disregarding public scrutiny towards their heinous actions for a while; he seems to be relishing in such scrutiny, compared to prior presidents like Nixon who desperately tried to hide their corruption from the public eye. Remember when Trump happily recounted how his billionaire friends made billions more in stocks after he ended his tariffs? If one person is able to manipulate the global economy like that, and openly state how it’s made him and his close circle richer, imagine how things could end up if those actions were continuously shrugged off and seen as the new ‘normal’. There is nothing normal about this at all, not in a moral sense, not in any sense, it’s an ever-steepening decline into unbridled greed. This maddening abuse of power doesn’t just end at America, although they have an awful lot to answer for, this extends to everywhere across the world, in your own country and in ours. We recently did a Reddit AMA a couple months back, and we received awe-inspiring messages from both a Palestinian fan and an Israeli fan, the latter of whom is actively protesting against the genocide their government is committing. It’s people like these two fans who come to mind whenever I think of that lyric you quoted; “emotion is contagious, see the domino effect flourish”. Everywhere, people are growing tired of the immense pain and suffering, whether that be an infliction on their own close ones or on people much like themselves in far-off lands. The ongoing horror can feel insurmountable in its scope, but this is precisely where we must do our part in detoxicating the world, so to speak. It may take generations of healing, and horrors may return in the usual cyclical nature of history, but we can’t wallow in misery and let that take course, change happens through continuous action, and that cycle can be broken; things do not have to be this way. We have to see things this way, it’s either that or give up and let hell break loose.