Les Nuits Botanique : Maruja - Gang Of Four - Liars & many more

Maruja • Gang of Four • Liars • Bathing Suits & many more

MARUJA

Manchester’s Maruja have established themselves as one of the most distinctive bands to emerge from the UK alternative scene in years. Three acclaimed EPs paved the way for their 2025 debut album ‘Pain to Power’, earning widespread critical recognition and building an extraordinary connection with a growing global following. Combining elements of jazz, punk, post-hardcore and improvisation, the band have become known for their uncompromising sound and transcendent live performances, playing sold out tours across the UK, Europe, North America and Asia, alongside major festival appearances.

Driven by a belief in solidarity, collective action and human connection, Maruja’s music confronts both personal and political boundaries. For a band whose music challenges the very systems within which they are forced to operate, their existence raises questions about the arguably radical act of being an artist in a culture that increasingly measures creative expression in commercial terms. In 2025, Maruja were named BBC Radio 6 Music’s Artist of the Year, recognition of a band whose uncompromising vision and commitment to music as a force for connection have resonated far beyond the confines of the alternative scene.

GANG OF FOUR

Dave Allen, Hugo Burnham, Andrew Gill, and Jon King came together as Gang Of Four in 1976 in Leeds, UK. They released the Damaged Goods EP on Fast Product in October, 1978; and on the heels of their first US tour in 1979, Entertainment! was released in September that year by EMI Records in the UK and Europe, and in the US by Warner Bros. Records in 1980. The album is considered a seminal work in the post-punk genre, being ranked 273 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2020, 49 th in their 100 Best Debut Albums of All Time in 2023, and as the fifth best album of 1979 by the NME. The band won Mojo’s ‘Inspiration’ Award in 2005.

Allen and Burnham left the band in the mid ’80s, but Gill and King continued, on and off with other musicians, until the original band re-united in 2005 for almost 2 years of touring and an album of re-recordings and additional mixes, Return The Gift. In 2012, King left, assuming the band would cease, but Gill continued working with various session players until his death in 2020.

2021 saw the release by Matador Records of the Grammy-nominated limited/numbered box set, Gang Of Four: 77-81. It sold out in three months. In 2021, Burnham and King drafted former G4-bassist Sara Lee (B-52s, Ani DiFranco, Indigo Girls, Ryuichi Sakamoto) and guitarist David Pajo (Slint, Stereolab, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol) in to start touring again, with great success and renewed energy. The current band with bassist Gail Greenwood (Belly, L7) and guitarist Ted Leo (TL & The Pharmacists, Aimee Mann, et al), recently completing the ‘Long Goodbye’ headlining tour of the US and Europe. Contrary to some assumptions, Gang Of Four has not retired

LIARS

Liars is the compositional project of Australian composer, producer and performer Angus Andrew. Since 1999, Liars has become one of contemporary music's most singular and continually evolving voices, with each release establishing its own distinct sonic and conceptual language.

Across more than two decades, Andrew has developed Liars as a vehicle for exploring composition, field recording, improvisation and experimental studio practice, creating a body of work that continually reimagines the possibilities of song, structure and sound.

Presented live by Angus Andrew with an ensemble of collaborators, Liars combines immersive sound, physical performance and an uncompromising commitment to musical reinvention, creating performances that are as unpredictable as they are emotionally direct.

BATHING SUITS

Bathing Suits are a Leeds four-piece who make dance music out of noise, and have spent 2026 proving it in rooms across the country. Their own tagline says it plainly: always dancey, always loud, always sexy.

The band formed in 2024 out of Leeds’ DIY party scene. Their earliest rehearsals took place in the same basements as their homemade club nights: tiny spaces transformed by blaring PAs, rumbling subwoofers and elaborate lighting rigs. Bassist Elise Hughes and guitarists George Dickinson and Alex Mulholland met at university and together started the promotions company Wisecrack, putting on fringe shows. Vocalist and drum-machine operator Freyja Blevins, who grew up in Peterborough feeling like an outsider, bonded with Hughes over the hyper-pop of PC Music, and the two were soon playing together.

That mix of club culture and confrontation is still central to how they sound. Pounding beats are welded to atonal, effects-heavy guitars, and the references run from 80s no wave to PC Music and pop. Their first gigs were twenty minutes of noise and a cover of Kesha’s ‘Tik Tok’. “We’re shoving abrasive sounds into a pop format,” Mulholland has said, and he calls it the closest thing the band has to a mission statement.

The live show is where it all comes together. Blevins writhes between the floor and the mic stand, often in a bathing suit, while the band build a wall of noise around her. At this year’s The Great Escape she scaled the stage rigging before ripping through the crowd. The band have since had to tone down the on-stage fights, though the equipment still takes a battering. Their songs are shaped by the road too: all five tracks on their debut EP were written while performing. That reputation has grown fast. In February they signed to Underplay Recordings, a new label distributed by Virgin Music Group, as its inaugural signing, and shared ‘Empathy’. The debut EP, ‘KILL BATHING SUITS’, followed in April. Recorded and produced by Leeds and Berlin-based DJ Subaru (Benny Howell), it moves between the seven-minute noise-trance sprawl of ‘Empathy’, the feedback and big-beat propulsion of ‘I Can Be A Freak’, a song built around an Estelle lyric, and the four-to-the-floor ferocity of ‘Swan Princess’. In September they released a reworked ‘I Can Be A Freak’ featuring Valentine Caulfield of Mandy, Indiana, which went straight onto the BBC Radio 6 Music playlist.

The honours have kept coming. They played three shows at The Great Escape, including the BBC Radio 6 Music stage, and won the festival’s Steve Strange Award. They headlined the Rising Stage at Green Man and have toured the UK with Man/Woman/Chainsaw. They join Yard Act for dates in November, ahead of a headline tour in February 2027. Their music has been supported by BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 6 Music and KEXP. Away from the stage, Blevins has been photographed by Hedi Slimane and walked for Vivienne Westwood at Paris Fashion Week. The Slimane shoot inspired their new single, ‘Do Ya?’, out on 29 October 2026. She describes it as a song about “want want want”: wanting a person, wanting money, always wanting more than you have. It also marks a shift for the band. They’re still noisy, but they want to learn to control the chaos, so it doesn’t swallow them or the dance floor.