Track By Tracks: MAW - The Humble Collapse (2025)


The Humble Collapse shortens to THC which is kinda a wink to all stoners around the world. It's a thing that restores faith and brings hope for all the stuff that I'm about to describe because outside of that the album is quite dark, unsetting, melancholic, etc. That's the bright side of the album haha.

Since it was written and recorded in the years 2020 and 2021, we all know the circumstances of that period.

The album is monotonous at times but has weird changes, shifts that at times, come out of nowhere, some speed-ups, and multiple influences from outside of typical stoner rock universum.

At that time nothing was certain and everything felt weird. On top of that long restrictive lockdowns in Cracow, Poland forced us to stay in our small apartments for whole months. Everything shut down, nothing to do.

The desert seemed a place that brought all we needed - space, freedom, silence, piece of mind.

The only way to get there was through music as we were stuck in a cold, gloomy, gray Polish winter. In a city covered in smog.

No way to travel, no way to play gigs, limited jamming, and no way to go and grab a drink or smoke a joint with friends. Just a depressing time to be honest.

We didn't know exactly where we were going both musically, with the band, and where the whole world was heading. So the album music reflects the uncertainty, melancholia, and longing for the old normal days, meetings, jams, shows, and travels. More than that if it comes to Maw everything was about to change as some of us decided to move out from Poland.

The guitarist Martyna left for the United States just 3 days after finishing live recordings (the album was recorded in two days).

Meantime some of us had life-changing events like new family members, and the drummer was moving to Austria.

Overall the whole future of the band was very uncertain. Add the whole paranoid, isolating world going through some sort of a pandemic.

In the early stages, no one really knew what was going on and how this all was gonna end, when we're gonna be able to play another show, and if we ever released anything else as Maw.

We just felt like we were collapsing. Humly, as we're not a big well-known band, also the process was so slow as time during COVID slowed down like crazy.

We had also become resigned to our fate. So we were humbly collapsing and maybe the world as we used to know too. And that's the title.

All of the above-mentioned desert vibes got mixed in the process with all other forms of emotions and vibes. The record really reflects how we felt.

Each member composed an interlude as the band wanted this album to be truly a work of all the members.

TheH, Umb, LeCo, Llap, Se - TheHumbleColapse.

The first one written by the guitarist Martyna Hebda is there to set the mood for the album.

Lead guitarist Kuba Stępień is the author of the second one. This one gives the desert/piece of mind feel.

The third one is written by our bassist - Piotr Stępień. It adds another layer of weirdness, it's very mechanical with a vibe of dystopia. It's also an introduction to electronic elements on this album as the next song will also contain some elements of it.

Our drummer wrote the fourth one, quite post-rock-sounding one. It expands on the collapsed world theme.

The last one is the only song in Polish. This interlude is the work of Jacek Niewiadomski who's our vocalist. It's an interlude that directly describes being stuck in COVID lockdown with the words "At the end, one might not have seen August. At some point, I thought I could catch my breath but September also began close to October. I don't want to overlook anything."

Each interlude is performed by only one of us at a time. So everyone recorded their own interlude.

Black Box talks about human nature, we cannot know and see exactly like any other human being.

Our behavior, and perception depend on our individual thought patterns mixed with our life experiences.

We don't even know if we really control thoughts or if it's just a pre-programmed set of conditions and rules and then our will is just an illusion of having the power to make a decision.

Even if we communicate about feelings and emotions it's gonna be received by others' mix of individual thinking patterns and experiences. So they cannot understand us fully and we cannot understand them fully.

Everyone is a black box. We can only see inputs and outputs and we cannot be certain about anything if it comes to communication, the real emotions of others, their perception, etc.

Nuisance Grounds is about human ethics, a problem with religion as the answer to the questions we cannot answer.

Humans like to think they know quite a bit while we don't even know the most basic things: why we even exist and if there are any real, natural rules or if all of these are artificial concepts that we've created throughout athe ges.

d Sea that song is very personal to Jacek and he's never actually confirmed what it is about.

He lost his friend whom he played with in another project due to cancer. This song is probably related to that tragic event.

Never Satisfied is a song that addresses the source of the reason why we feel a need for philosophy.

How our belief system affects our actions how it shapes our lives, society, civilizations, etc. Humankind trying to reach the truth. The goal is never fully achieved but in the process,s we're dealing with a lot of side effects of our search.

Searching for logic when there can be no logic in all of that. It's almost like we need that to prevent us from collapsing while we've never actually been able to provide any answers that would satisfy us as a whole.

Still addresses the past, that feeling when certain experiences, and traumas from the past keep you frozen when you should take action.

Repeating mistakes, coping in a way that harms you instead of healing a source of the whole suffering.

It's something inside of you, yourself from the past that enslaves you to keep standing still when the action is needed.

It's free to interpretation as it can be related to a person, to us as humankind or our civilization, society, etc. It also comes with a certain acceptance that you know it all is gonna end in a bad way but you're accepting that because it feels better to lose than to fight. Because it feels relaxing and safe to not do anything and let it be.

You/We/I resigned to the fate.

And in the end, after it all collapsed, we all collapsed you can take a deep breath and officially become one of the Citizens of Dunes.

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