LUNA MARBLE - SELF TITLED ALBUM- REVIEW.
- The Joker
- Nov 24, 2025
- 6 min read
Release: 7 November 2025 - Self Release
I want to be excited about Luna Marble. I do, truly. They're a Manchester rock band who worked for five years between lockdowns, lineup changes, and the constant 2020s touring band farce of existing forever, to be left with a self-titled debut that's like your dad's record collection got tired, woke up, and created a Tinder profile. "Vintage grunge meets extraterrestrial sound design."
This album is like a séance that involuntarily brought Robert Plant's falsetto instead of their granny. But then, so do about every other denim-clad Brighton-to-Glasgow outfit who think that an overdriven Fender Twin is a persona.
Luna Marble aren't cosplaying the '70s so much as they're communing with it. There is a difference between wanting to be Led Zeppelin and wanting to understand why Led Zeppelin mattered. Luna Marble have got the riffs, but they also have that intangible feeling that informs them, "The point of this isn't to be retro, it's to come together." You can feel them trying to redo what was possible when four people occupied a room and gave their everything before auto-tune turned the world sterile.
Maria Rico is a singer who possesses one of those voices that does not just "cut through the mix" (a terrible expression, invented by men who think volume equates to emotion). She's the kind of singer who has learned how to phrase from her own pain, and not from a YouTube tutorial. Even when she's warbling space jazz nonsense about waves and redemption and the world. She could sing your internet bill and I'd still nod my head.
This debut offering was recorded live by four individuals, in a room, together. (Remember together?) You can hear the amp hum, the mic bleed, the ghostly apparitions of humans being human. It's imperfect and beautiful in the same way that a warbly record is better than the perfect remaster. It breathes. It sweats. It falters sometimes, like a real band, not a Logic Profile project that learned to love.
"Running": launches the thing, and it's exactly what you think it will be — propulsive, assertive, maybe just a little too assertive, like a band hitting the stage and yelling "ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?!" before the crowd's even had a chance to find the loos. But it works. It's their first recorded track, their mission statement. It’s about resilience, breaking free and refusing to quit. All the standard motivational poster stuff that somehow lands because you can tell they mean it.
"All of My Love": Is not the Zeppelin song, but just imagine if they had the courage. It struts and comes in around bluesy empowerment anthem/break-up therapy session with enhanced guitar tone. It is wonderful! It's "snappy"! (Not mine, theirs.) You can dance to it if you're that kind of creature who gets off on dancing to 7/8 time signatures.
"Crazy Loving": was written when Maria was 18. It's innocent and insecure and genuine and brimming with that adolescent confidence that love saves you or kills you. It's a song that should shame you, but instead it makes you nostalgic for when you really felt something before adulthood toughened your heart into Spotify garbage.
Then there’s “So Long.” A song about how exhausting it is to be in a band in the 21st century. It’s not their most musically daring moment, but it’s maybe their most honest. The lyrics basically say, “We’re tired. We’re broke. We still have to go to work tomorrow.” It’s the rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of crying in the staff toilet.
"Sea of Sorrow": Is a Classic Rock Magazine's Track of the Week, which is the equivalent of a gold medal in a nostalgia triathlon. This is the anthem, and it has that Fleetwood Mac gloss, that Zeppelin majesty, and that wonderful feeling in which sorrow and ecstasy march hand in hand off a cliff. It's the one that makes you go, "Okay, well, rock isn't dead after all, it's just scrolled Instagram for too long."
"Begging Mercy": this is erotic freedom colliding with Catholic shame. It's sexed up church rock and it's better than it has any business being. Rico was raised Catholic, and you can tell.
She's reliving decades of psychic harassment on bent amplifiers and maybe a couple of exorcisms. You can feel the repression quivering under the chords like a nun clutching her rosary in a XXX show.
"Waves": is the sweeping poetic ballad in which everything dissolves into metaphor. The sea, rebirth, change, infinity. It has to be pretentious, but isn't, because she sells it. It's as if Florence Welch had gotten drunk and learned humility. The lyrics drift somewhere between art-school depth and actual emotion, and for once the band's cosmic racket actually works.
And lastly, we end with "Mad World." Not a Tears for Fears cover, alas, but a searing closer in any case. The most raw, most youthful song on this list. Written at 18 and clearly written with the music industry before she'd ever begun. It's rage filtered through exhaustion, a song about fighting to get heard in an industry that still thinks "female-fronted" is a genre. It doesn't end. It just ends. Like life. Which leads us to the larger picture: Luna Marble exist in a rock world that's still about 80% leather-jacketed dudes named Dave who are behaving as if progress reached its peak with "Smoke on the Water." That Rico and her multinational
cohorts even exist, playing this, is a kind of revolution. It shouldn't be, but it is.
There’s evidence that maybe the next generation of classic rock doesn't have to be like the last. Their branding floats precariously between actually being artistic and "Urban Outfitters tarot deck." But unlike just about every other band that employs "cosmic" imagery becauseit'll sound deep, Luna Marble actually do. There's thought. They’re trying to say something about transcendence, about being more than just a riff machine. Sometimes they nail it; sometimes they sound like a stoned horoscope column.
But I’d rather a band try to sound profound and fail than settle for “mid-tempo riff about whiskey and women.”
Five years to make this album. Was it worth the wait? It depends on how patient you are for five years of waiting for a band to make "pretty good." But perhaps that's not the question.
Perhaps it took five years because they were discovering who they were, and perhaps this is what it sounds like to be coming into being: jagged, inconsistent, sometimes great, sometimes maddening, but always exhaling.
Will they retool the genre? No. Will they make your dad cry because someone still cares about tone and live cuts and emotional truth? Possibly. Will they single-handedly resuscitate rock music? Don't be stupid. But they will make you wonder why you ever cared about it in the first place.
This is an album that believes in emotion. And you know what? I'll take that to perfection any day.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 guitars, 1.5 pints of real ale, and a single exasperated sigh of optimism. Or "between pretty good and fuck it, I think they can do it."
For fans of: Greta Van Fleet (but with even more aware and better-written lyrics), Rival Sons (the obvious comparison), The Pretty Reckless (the female-led rock section), and anyone ever who's ever argued that vinyl is superior because it has "warmth" or "soul" or whatever we're currently calling the pleasant distortions of analog media.
Recommended listening context: Late night, good whiskey or decent beer, the kind of friends who still care about album side A vs. side B and will argue about which Led Zeppelin album is superior, III or IV. Driving at night down empty roads also works. So does whatever context in which you must pretend to still derive some benefit from rock music even if you're not quite sure that you do.
Avoid if: You think music made after 1979 is of the same higher quality all around, you're of the "authenticity" in rock music school of thought (either pro or con), you prefer innovation over execution, or you just really don't like the sound of Hammond organs and bluesy guitar solos. Also avoid if you're the kind of person who gets mad when critics write long, digressive reviews that talk about everything except the actual music. Sorry, not sorry.