Maria Iskariot still has no answers to your questions. But they’re reaching out anyway - a wet hand, a wink, a scream, a mess of noise and emotion for anyone who’s danced the Waltz of the Hopeless more times than they’d like to admit.
Their debut album Wereldwaan is punk that doesn’t preach, but refuses to look away. It’s both a joyful protest and a sharp, complicated love letter to life itself - written from inside the confusion, the guilt, the rage and the absurdity of our time. Released via Burning Fik (NL) and Montgrí (ES), it marks their arrival as a powerful new voice in the trans-European punk scene.
Maria Iskariot is a Dutch-language punk band from Ghent with a clear sense of purpose and a deep love for distortion. Formed in 2022 by frontwoman Helena Cazaerck and guitarist Loeke Vanhoutteghem - who first bonded over language and the DIY ethos at a literary festival - the band found its full shape with the addition of drummer Sybe Versluys and bassist Amanda Barbosa. What began as a personal outlet quickly grew into a collective voice: part panic attack, part poetic pamphlet, part riot - but with tenderness, too. The band doesn’t break things (there’s already enough broken); they build, scream, whisper, and hold space.
The name says a lot: Maria Iskariot fuses the sacred (Maria) and the damned (Judas Iskariot), pointing straight to the band’s fascination with moral tension, contradiction and collapse. That duality runs through everything - in their sound, their lyrics, and their presence. They make music about growing up, feeling lost, confronting complicity, and trying to find slivers of hope inside the overwhelm. It’s aggressive and intimate, messy and meticulous, playful and deeply serious.
Wereldwaan expands on the themes of their debut EP EN/EN (2024), which explored identity, moral ambiguity, and a longing for something different in a world that doesn’t reward doubt. On the album, the band sharpen their tools and open up their vision - tackling everything from social despair to interpersonal grief to the absurdity of performance itself. But it’s never didactic. Instead, they offer a kind of solidarity through shared confusion: as Helena puts it,
“We are four people that have found each other. Being a gang, having fun and creating something meaningful together, is our way of coping with the madness attacking us from inside and out. We try to make something beautiful out of frustration, unwanted complicity, greed, fingerpointing, ugliness. We choose life.
We choose not falling for the temptation of depression or aggression. We choose to be friends, not colleagues, we choose to be adventurers not competitors. We choose togetherness not efficiency. We choose expression not the measure stick.
We speak to you, our friends from different languages, in a way that is not about understanding.
We don’t have solutions for the problems that surround us. We don’t claim to know the answer. We only show the alternative.”
Live, Maria Iskariot is a full-body experience - Helena prowls through the crowd, words in your face, daring you to feel something. A live session of “Leugenaar” went viral in early 2024, racking up 2 million views and winning fans from every corner (yes, even Billie Eilish’s dad and Justin Raisen). The band was quickly scooped up by Tropical Fuck Storm to support their UK and Scandinavian tour, blowing away rooms full of people who didn’t understand a word of Dutch but didn’t need to.
Over the course of 2024–25, Maria Iskariot played more than 180 shows across Europe - from sweaty squats to big venues - and picked up serious momentum. They won Humo’s Rock Rally, Belgium’s most prestigious band competition, and were named SoundTrack laureates. They’ve since teamed up with booking agencies across Belgium (Busker), the Netherlands (Radar), Germany (Drift Booking), Spain (Montgrí), and France (WAPA), laying the groundwork for a massive 2026 tour in support of Wereldwaan.
But they’re not just a band on the rise. They’re a band with a worldview. They reject the grind and competition of the music industry and lean into togetherness, mess, joy, and the strange intimacy of singing with strangers. They’re not trying to be understood - they’re trying to connect.
Maria Iskariot is punk in the truest sense: a refusal to conform, a celebration of imperfection, a bold and beautiful mess with its arms wide open.
