Review: Maruja – Pain to Power

Style: Post-rock, post-punk, free-form jazz (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Black Country, New Road, Squid, Colin Stetson, Black Midi
Country: United Kingdom
Release date: 12 September 2025

I really like paying men to yell at me. As an avid concert-goer, I’ve seen over fifty bands so far this year alone. While my taste is quite broad, I’d conservatively estimate that at least half of those shows featured some kind of yelling or screaming man.¹ A skilled vocalist can convey a terrific range of expression, musicality, and climactic emotion without hitting a single note, and in doing so, embody a visceral, compelling force that rings with catharsis that I can’t find anywhere else.

If yelling men are my poison of choice, then Maruja’s Pain to Power promised a fresh vintage. To date, I’ve only listened to the young English post-punk group on a streaming platform which I prefer not to endorse, so while I may not be bankrolling their burgeoning musical career yet, I was nonetheless curious to see if their particular flavour of caustic aggression—which came highly recommended by one Subway colleague, and described as “snotty shout-singing” by another—would scratch the itch for me.

Following a handful of EPs and demos, Pain to Power is Maruja’s first full-length album. Their sound floats somewhere on a desolate, desaturated post-punk island with smokey jazz saxophone hanging thick in the air. It’s a style that bears comparison to post-punk contemporaries like Squid and Black Country, New Road, but Maruja occupy their own unique set of coordinates on the map. From the album’s opening moments on “Bloodsport”, Pain to Power swells with frantic urgency, as if Maruja is trying to defuse a bomb in a scraggy, desolate musical landscape. The scattershot drums, sax and guitar scrabbling and scraping up and down the scale, and the insistent, politically galvanic shout-rap all seem to be saying the same thing, just in different languages. 

With the free-flowing amorphousness of a compositional process rooted in improvisation², the vocals and instrumental ensemble ebb and flow from foreground to background. The saxophone, expertly wielded by Joe Carroll, may at one moment hulk low and squat at the base of the musical structure—as in the opening of “Break the Tension”—before careening up to frenzied, free-jazz squalls. Rhythmic and melodic structures fray and disintegrate at the edges in intros and outros, with the momentum of an unrelenting anxiety running constant underneath. But that same improvisatory looseness also proves to be a double-edged sword. Pain to Power is immersive in the moment, but in retrospect, individual songs can feel more like fragments of one sprawling jam session than discrete, fully-formed statements.

Vocalist Harry Wilkinson’s performance is far more emotionally charged than it is technically impressive. Though his singing is sometimes thin and lacking a robust foundation, many effective passages, like that from 5:30 to 6:30 in “Look Down On Us”, trip from spoken word to shouting to singing in their haste to convey a thought or feeling. These passages crackle with electricity as Wilkinson impels us to feel alongside him. But on an album with such a larger-than-life vocal performance and weighty themes, there’s little room to hide from clunky lyrics, and unfortunately Pain to Power has some weaknesses in this regard. The lyrics are at their best when they’re infused with gruesome yet poetic imagery like the “leather lungs blackened” in “Trenches”, or “blood dripping down to the claws on their feet” in “Look Down On Us”. Wilkinson even rolls a few R’s as he spits out these phrases with charged gravitas. However, the less sensorily vivid lyrics that appear on the majority of tracks often tend closer to strings of moralistic anti-establishment buzzwords and navel-gazing platitudes. It would be a bit trite to sing “It’s our differences that make us beautiful” one time, but this lyric’s numerous repetitions in “Saoirse” distract from what’s otherwise one of the album’s most melodically verdant tracks.

On Pain to Power, Maruja deliver plenty of the raw-throated urgency I seek out in music, shouting across their own stark island of post-punk power and free-form jazz frenzy. It’s not a lush or welcoming place, but the tension and abrasion that the band embraces are integral to their allure. For someone with such a penchant for yelling men, for better or worse, Maruja’s sound is bracingly aggressive. Pain to Power is a volatile, imperfect album, and with a touch more navigational finesse on this rocky terrain, the next album could reach new heights.

Recommended tracks: Look Down On Us, Born to Die, Break the Tension
You may also like: The Orchestra (For Now), Eunuchs, Sprain, Shearling
Final verdict: 7/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Music for Nations – Facebook | Official Website

Maruja is:
– Matt Buonaccorsi (Bass)
– Joe Carroll (Saxophone)
– Jacob Hayes (Drums)
– Harry Wilkinson (Vocals, guitar)

1. Women are also welcome to yell at me, but I typically opt to explore my mommy issues through other means. ↩︎
2. Previous release Tír na nÓg was fully improvised, and the band has stated that they prefer this approach over sitting down to compose and practice songs. ↩︎