The Sound of Learning How to Live Again: Masuna - Martyrs (Album Review) Released: 12/15/22

 

Some albums are built after the fact, an artist looking back to construct a narrative around finished songs. "Martyrs," the 2022 debut full-length from Masuna, was built the opposite way in real time, day by day, as a document of survival written while the survival was still happening. Recorded across the first six months after leaving a relationship marked by years of abuse, the album functions less like a collection of songs and more like a diary, one that doesn't smooth over the mess of early healing in favor of something more palatable. It's a record about learning to live after being taught, for years, how to merely endure. The title track opens the album as exactly what its creator has described it as: a war cry. Where the rest of the record will slow down to sit with grief, confusion, and eventual forgiveness, "Martyrs" arrives as pure adrenaline, a declaration of freedom rendered through visceral, almost violent imagery of self-transformation. There's something purposeful in using body modification as a central metaphor here, reclaiming a body that had been hurt by someone else by choosing, for once, exactly what happens to it. It's not a comfortable opener, and it isn't meant to be. It's the sound of someone breaking a door down rather than quietly walking through it.

"Magnum Opus" follows, and the title alone suggests a shift toward self-authorship, an attempt to reframe a life interrupted by abuse as something still capable of being a masterwork rather than wreckage. "Dreams of Damnation," featuring SOLARIA, digs into the nightmare logic of trauma, the way abuse doesn't stay contained to waking hours but follows into sleep, into imagination, into every corner of the mind that should otherwise be safe. The brief, restless "Chromatic Puzzle" acts almost like a fragment of racing, overstimulated thought, mirroring the album's early insistence that healing doesn't arrive in a straight line but in scattered, colliding pieces. "Headlights" and "Lobotomy" mark some of the record's most unsettling territory. Where "Headlights" suggests something caught suddenly in the glare, exposed and unable to move, "Lobotomy" leans into a much darker idea: the desire to simply stop feeling, to be surgically relieved of memory and pain rather than forced to process it. It's a bleak, brutally honest moment on an album that doesn't shy away from admitting that recovery sometimes looks like wanting to disappear rather than triumphantly overcome.

"Stardust" offers a tonal shift, pulling back toward something more expansive and cosmic, a reminder that the self being rebuilt here is made of the same fundamental material as everything else, however far away that feels in the middle of crisis. That idea of reconstruction becomes explicit in "Kintsugi," a title borrowed from the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, treating the fracture itself as part of the object's beauty rather than something to hide. It's one of the clearest thesis statements on the record: not a return to who the narrator was before, but the deliberate construction of someone new out of the damage. "Wither" pulls back into darker, more depleted territory, a song about the exhaustion that healing doesn't erase just because progress has technically been made. "When You Die, I'll Carrion," featuring SOLARIA again, is one of the album's sharpest turns, using the imagery of scavenging and decay to voice something rawer and angrier than forgiveness, an unfiltered fantasy about outliving an abuser and what's left once they're gone. It's a moment the album earns by not rushing past it; anger, after all, is as much a part of this diary as anything gentler.

Which makes "Petals" land as powerfully as it does. Coming after the album's angriest moment, "Petals" marks the record's turn toward forgiveness, not of the self, but of one of the people who caused this damage in the first place. It's a striking sequencing choice, refusing to pretend that forgiveness arrives easily or immediately after rage, instead letting both exist within the same emotional timeline, sometimes only tracks apart. The album closes with "Naturträne," a German title translating roughly to "nature's tears," a quiet, wrung-out coda that lets the record end not in triumph, but in something closer to release. What makes "Martyrs" so striking isn't polish; it's proximity. This is an album made without the benefit of hindsight, written in the thick of treatment, unstable living situations, and the daily, unglamorous work of unlearning years of harm. It doesn't offer a clean arc from victim to survivor; it offers something closer to the truth: freedom, rage, numbness, tenderness, and forgiveness all occupying the same six-month window, sometimes within the same week. That's precisely why it works. "Martyrs" isn't a record about having already healed. It's a record about the very beginning of learning how, made by someone brave enough to press record before knowing how the story would end.

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