🎧 Approved: Maruja

Mancunian quartet Maruja make music that feels volatile but deeply intentional - post-punk shot through with free jazz, anchored by spoken word vocals that carry a sense of both protest and spiritual searching.

Their new single ‘Saoirse’ (Gaelic for freedom) is a monument to this ideology: transcendent sax, sweeping strings and Harry Wilkinson’s plaintive vocal at its core. It opens with a fractured flute line, disorienting but tender, giving way to a saxophone that becomes the track’s emotional spine, compassionate and mournful. Wilkinson’s vocal sits just above the chaos, steady and clear.

As the track progresses, it starts to unravel. The flute builds, the saxophone strains, drums tighten and suddenly, the calm is gone. The track doesn’t explode so much as spill over. By the end, everything is laid bare.

Inspired by a decades-old comic strip found in saxophonist Joe Carroll’s Irish grandfather’s belongings, showing a member of the Black and Tans boarding a boat from Dublin to Palestine, the song reflects on cycles of displacement and solidarity. The band puts it simply: “Saoirse means freedom, something we are witnessing being violently denied to the people of Palestine”. 

At its close, Wilkinson repeats a single line “It’s our differences that make us beautiful”. It’s not a slogan, just a quiet insistence.

Their debut album ‘Pain To Power’ is out 12 Sep.

🎧 Watch the video for 'Saoirse' below