Nameless Friends: The Quiet Part, Loudly
(Self Release)
LP | DL
Toronto quartet Nameless Friends’ sophomore album The Quiet Part, Loudly arrives with a bold sense of purpose and theatrical urgency that immediately sets it apart.
Opening with EVERYTHING IS FINE, the album immediately sets a scene, blending the scrappy charm of a band mid line check amid the bubbling chatter of a crowded bar. It captures those liminal pre-gig moments as drummer, bass player and guitarist playfully jam, setting the scene for the album, like soundchecking before a gig.
I’m Afraid Of Failure follows with a blast of fuzzy, Gaelic-tinged punk that feels ripped straight from an early-2000s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater soundtrack. From the jump, the band showcase the intensity, energy, and distinct sonic identity that’s been driving their growing momentum. Fusing trad-folk vocal melodies with gritty garage rock guitars and punchy, hi-tempo, boxy drums, the track’s sound palette sets a blueprint for the album.
Elsewhere across the thirteen tracks, Clara brings a driving hard-rock intensity under the strikingly clean production of the vocals. Westward Ho continues the hard rock trend, while More skirts on the edge of hair metal, pulled towards a more punk-garage-rock intensity thanks to the loose nature of the production and the fuzzy fizz of the guitar work.
The ten minute epic The Ballad Of John Van highlights more of the band’s prog influences with sprawling instrumental breaks, moments of reflective calm and splashes of visceral grit, at times comparable in part to TOOL.
One of the album’s other highlights, There’s A Rapist In The White House, delivers biting political commentary at a time that feels, unfortunately, very necessary. A more gentle soundscape underpins it, with the band stripping back the fuzzy guitar tones in favour of a more considered approach. A bopping bass line, tight drums and twinkling clean guitar tones evoke The Cranberries under the pointed vocal delivery and carefully constructed lyricism.
Closing the album with the theatrical grit of Lungs and the equally performative and intense Blasphemy, the band’s unique colourful yet fuzzy, dark and playfully genre-melding sound shines bright.
The blissful field recordings of bees buzzing and birds tweeting close the album on an unexpectedly serene note, almost satirically contrasting the driving energy that permeates the record.
Talking about the album, the band explain: “This album is a love letter with constructive criticism to our home country. If you didn’t care about improving the relationship, you wouldn’t bother giving the criticism. It’s about choosing to position yourself in the middle of not just a culture war, but in some cases real, literal violence and deciding to be who you are anyway.”
Ultimately, The Quiet Part, Loudly thrives on contradiction – joy and rage, polish and chaos, intimacy and spectacle. Whether it fully succeeds may depend on how much disorder you are willing to embrace, but it consistently feels intentional rather than accidental. There’s a lack of polish in the production which at first is quite jarring, but as the record unfolds it becomes one of its greatest strengths, lending immediacy and raw grit to the performances. Instead of tipping into pastiche, it holds its balance just enough to ground its more flamboyant moments, keeping the record playful, visceral and tightly wound where it could otherwise spill into excess.
In the end, it doesn’t just present a band experimenting with sound, but one actively wrestling with identity, tone and contradiction in real time. That tension is exactly where the album feels most alive.
Follow Nameless Friends
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All words by Simon Lucas-Hughes. More writing by Simon Lucas-Hughes can be found at his author’s archive.
Photo by Tom Sinclair supplied.
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