Nameless Friends think big. Big music. Big sound. Big ideas. Go big or go home. Which is part of the reason why the ferocious rock band from London, Ontario, wrote their new single “Need” about the biggest problem of the modern world: climate change and its relationship to economic inequality.
Fun times, right? But Nameless Friends is not a dour band. Far from it. This is also the band who put out a live album of Queen covers, recorded in front of a sold-out crowd at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern—because they’re the kind of band that can actually pull off a Queen cover set, with all the musical chops and sense of camp that requires.
The forthcoming new album by Nameless Friends is called Blasphemy, and in their own words, “it’s a high concept record about intense, personal subjects.” They’re likely the only commercial rock band in the world to write a song about reproductive and menstrual rights (“7 Years of Blood”). Their debut EP, 2018’s Mezzanine, was a song cycle about grief. The songs by this female-fronted, multicultural, queer-inclusive band have struck a powerful chord with audiences, including a recent hometown crowd of 15,000 people.
Despite their serious subject matter, “Joy, hope and love are also intense personal experiences,” says the singer, producer, guitar-maker and founding member known only to the outside world as Number One. “We’re trying to present those truths with as much courage as the hard stuff. We’re trying to make music about the justice we want to see in the world, that’s also really bloody fun to listen to.”
Blasphemy is out on May 19, 2023. It was mixed by Andrew McLeod (Sunnsetter) and mastered by Darcy Proper (first female engineer to win a Grammy). Nameless Friends are touring Ontario and Quebec in May and June, and head to Western Canada in fall 2023.
