Columbus, Ohio’s Maranatha have never operated like a traditional band—and that’s by design. “I started this band in 2011 as a bedroom project,” says Collin Simula, who handles vocals, guitars, and drums on record. At the time, life dictated the pace. “My kids were very young, and my career was taking off, so I wasn’t really able to do a ‘regular band’ for a minute.” That changed in 2013 when longtime friend Jack Huston joined on bass and vocals. “We’d been talking about playing heavy music together for 10 years, and it finally worked out.”
Even now, Maranatha exists on its own terms. Simula continues to track drums in the studio, while a rotating cast has handled live duties—currently Jordan Sloan (One Thousand Blades, Red Temple Pray), who Simula tells No Echo is “absolutely killing it.”
Musically, Maranatha’s sound is most easily described as sludge, but that label only tells part of the story. “It’s really an amalgamation of all of the heavy music we love,” Simula explains. Hardcore remains a core element on their new LP, King of Ruin. “We’re lifelong hardcore scene guys, so the ethos, passion, and urgency of hardcore will always be in our music—there are plenty of moshable sludge riffs and two-steps on King of Ruin.”
From there, the band pulls in a wide spectrum of influences. Simula points to the weight of Crowbar, the melodic depth of Pallbearer, the crushing density of Conan, and even traces of ‘90s groove metal shaping the record’s single-note riffing. The end result, as he puts it plainly: “This record is just heavy as hell.”
That heaviness runs deep through King of Ruin’s themes. The album was a long time in the making, pieced together slowly between the demands of everyday life. “We’ve been working on King of Ruin for a long time. Too long,” Simula admits. “Life gets in the way when you’re in your 40s with teenage kids.” Aside from drums tracked by Josh Nunn at Daily Grind in Columbus, the rest of the record was built in Simula’s home studio, “chipping away at it a couple hours at a time over the course of a year or so.”
That process mirrors the emotional weight of the album itself. “It’s an exploration of the difficulty of the weight of life,” Simula says, pointing to themes of relationships, parenting, spirituality, and the current socio-political climate. The tone throughout is intentionally bleak. “The record has an almost ‘defeated’ feel to it, like you’re just trudging along, pushing through life, while everything around you seems to be exponentially going to shit.”
At its core, King of Ruin is Maranatha at their most exposed. “I have a hard time even reading some of my own lyrics on this one, it’s that vulnerable and raw,” Simula admits. That vulnerability, however, is the point. “This record is about creating a sacred space for exploring and coming to terms with deep feelings of sadness or anger or frustration,” he says. “Our hope is that this can be a catharsis… a reminder that we’re not alone in those heavy times of life.”
Back home, that community is thriving. “Columbus has a lot of very sick bands,” Simula says, rattling off names like Bather, Limb from Limb, Disnerve, Unholy Swarm, Sanguisugabogg, Rejoice, Violent Nature, Coward, Out in Front, and Anatomize. “Central Ohio is absolutely killing it right now.”
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