Nameless Friends: Spite-fueled Chaotic Do-Gooders with Electric Guitars
Written by: Brooke Eboule
“Update on our rock band’s feud with the Premier of Saskatchewan,” the long-haired brunette began, standing above her phone, hair dangling toward the camera. I stopped swiping up on TikTok and listened with increasing mirth as she described how her band, Nameless Friends (who go about band business under the aliases of Number One through Number Seven), rigged their email list to send “citizen feedback” to Scott Moe, the Premier of Saskatchewan, each time someone new subscribed.
The automated messages would speak against the province’s new discriminatory and potentially harmful naming and pronoun policy, which forces students under the age of 16 to have parental consent to use their chosen name or have their gender expression affirmed at school. While the topic itself is far from trivial, there was just something so… amusingly petty (not to mention marketing genius-y) about the approach. I wanted to know more.
“That is a particularly personal note for me,” said Number Seven, one of the group's drummers. “Growing up in Saskatchewan as a queer kid, that [campaign] is 100% me being petty and angry.”
“Aren’t we all in our female rage eras?” Number One mused, noting that the campaign ultimately resulted in more than 3,000 emails sent to the politician. “I’m so motivated by spite but I’m not a petty person. I’m just tired of crap... I was raised in a household where, when I was being bad, the question was always ‘are we using our powers for good or for evil?’ In this context I thought why not both? Why not use our powers for good and, not necessarily evil, but civil disobedience. Chaotic good.”
The London, Ontario-based band does seem to have a certain knack for turning spite into rocket fuel. When it proved challenging to quickly get the 4,000 watch hours required to monetize their latest music video to raise money for queer- and trans-supporting organizations, they began selling t-shirts with Scott Moe’s face – complete with graffiti-like scribbles depicting the Premier as a devil – surrounded by the words “Go fuck yourself Scott Love Nameless Friends.” All proceeds from those sales have been pledged to Rainbow Railroad, a group that helps queer people escape state-sponsored violence, and Trans Lifeline, a crisis and peer-support hotline for trans people staffed entirely by other trans people.
Hate comments on a single? Put them in the next music video!
Then there’s the time a major Canadian record producer told the band that they’d ruin their careers by continuing with the “hysterical pussy shit.” One member took heed of the producer’s warnings and decided to leave the band, but “the rest of us just sort of said wow, now we’re gonna do it harder,” said Number One. In fact, the band’s best-selling tour shirt is now the purple “hysterical pussy” tee, featuring a photo of Number One’s cat “looking incredibly pissed off.”
So what kind of “hysterical pussy shit” are we talking here? Well, as far as Number One knows, Nameless Friends is the only commercial rock band in the world with a song about reproductive and menstrual rights. ‘Seven Years of Blood’ is a tune rooted in Number One’s own experiences with endometriosis and being unable to insure tours in certain American states because her condition sometimes requires abortion-adjacent medical care. Notably, the song avoids gendered pronouns, to be as inclusive as possible. Similarly, while the track ‘Sympathy for Lilith’ addresses female trauma, the lyrics take care not to have that embodied in the AFAB experience. In a twist that functions as a satisfying middle finger to the aforementioned producer, the music video for that one was an official selection in the Forest City Film Festival’s experimental category earlier this month. It’s described as “a female villain origin story told through epic prog-rock and hundreds of real-world headlines about violence against women.”
Given these topics that Nameless Friends rock out to, it might be tempting to imagine the glam prog rockers as an all-female group, but none of Number One’s bandmates share in the uterus-based life experience. The way they stand with her in addressing these topics, though – heads up, shoulders back – exemplifies the solidarity they share as a group, a solidarity that is also an essential quality of the music that they make.
“Having community and solidarity and being seen feels good,” explained Number One, adding that making people feel seen is a core intent for her as a musician. “We all just went through two years of being stuck indoors and not in community, not being seen, not feeling empowered. Not having vital human interactions that we crave.” And that’s just those of us who aren’t under constant attack for who we are. “We wrote our [debut album Blasphemy] in solidarity with the communities being targeted and oppressed in the name of capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist religious freedom,” she said, describing it as both a concept and protest album. “[It’s] about what it means to be blasphemous, in the context of this rise of faith that says the body you live in or the kind of person you are is against the natural order of things.”
Collectively, Nameless Friends have the lived experience of being female, queer (both out and not), an immigrant, a person of color, as well as living with chronic illness and neurodivergence. While the individual members of the band may not experience the full range of issues they address in music, there’s plenty of compassion and virtuous rage to go around. “Once you’ve experienced one level of systemic oppression, you look out and see the intersections that other people are facing,” said Number One. So, while she believes that we need “vapid music”, indeed that it’s a “vital part of culture,” she also doesn’t really know how people don’t feel compelled to call out and act against oppression if they have a platform to do so.
“I don’t run out of petty just because the situation doesn’t directly affect me,” she said. “If it affects my friends, my bandmates, the queer community, I have petty enough for that, too. The energy can be directed. That’s what solidarity is.” The challenge, says Number One, is to tell stories about things that are hard in a way that makes people feel good. “Like it says in our bio, we make music about the justice we’d like to see in the world that’s also fun to listen to. Because it can be both.”
It helps to be surrounded by bandmates who are of a similar mindset and can bring that into their musicianship. Like Number Three, the guitarist. “[He’s] such an anti-lead guitar player,” said Number One. “He does not subscribe to a lot of the masculine norms around the instrument, so he spent a lot of time sort of dicking around with the seven strings and different tunings and just kind of brought that metal sensibility to the album, but in a feminist way. That was really important to him.”
That fun but meaningful ethos is also evident in the music video for the band’s latest single, ‘Demons’. The band has said it’s a satirical take on the gaslighting and toxic positivity so often found in organized religion, as well as a biting critique of religious discrimination toward queer individuals and
communities. It features a “sexy gay baptism in a kiddie pool,” 12,000 hand-strewn rainbow rose petals, and most importantly, Toronto drag queen Jordana Miles embodying queer joy. “It’s the best thing we’ve ever made,” said Number One. “I don’t say that lightly. It was very fun to do.”
Number One makes a point of noting that there are just two places in Canada that sell the baptismal robes the band wears in the video: the Catholic Church and Amazon. “So we bought them ethically,” she said, smirking. “We ordered them off Amazon.” She’s quick to add that the band has no bone to pick with spirituality or faith. “Those are really beautiful human endeavors. My bone to pick is with man-made institutions that tell you there is a way to be inherently unlovable and their sky daddy says so. I reject that.”
Released at the end of September, the video has already racked up more than 11,000 views, and the band still intends to earmark any earnings it ever generates for the organizations previously named. Yes, in spite of all the, well, spite, that the band seems to thrive on, at the core they’re really just “do-gooders with electric guitars,” as Number One puts it. Case in point: Throughout October, the band was on the prairies leg of their Blasphemy release tour. At the outset, the band posted on social media, inviting anyone who wanted to come to a show but couldn’t afford it to contact them. “Inflation sucks and capitalism is hell, and we want you there,” they said.
In addition to the debut album, Blasphemy – which was mastered by Darcy Proper, the first female engineer to win a Grammy – released last May, Nameless Friends’ discography also includes debut EP Mezzanine and “Live at Stranded Fest,” packed with covers of iconic Queen hits. Next up for Nameless Friends is a show at the Bovine Sex Club in Toronto on November 16, along with Big Milk and Untimely Dosage.
You can find them on X, Instagram, and TikTok, @namelessfriends.