Who Needs Truth Anyway Enters the Hard Rock Conversation Four Years Late
Ten Tracks, Seventy Backers, and Eleven Singles That Came First
By the time No More Fridays put out an album, they had already released eleven standalone tracks. Who Needs Truth Anyway landed on 15 October 2021 as the first full-length in a catalogue that had been running as singles for years. Seventy backers paid for it to exist on cassette, CD and vinyl before a note of it reached a shop.
You can listen to our full playlist which contains the artists’ music, and know more about the artist’s work by scrolling down the page.
Where Who Needs Truth Anyway Sits In The No More Fridays Catalogue
The Tallinn band’s Bandcamp page still shows the shape of it. One album. Eleven separate tracks around it. That is not the usual run for a rock band, and it explains why a 2021 debut is only now getting a proper look.
Recording started in August 2020. Two singles went out while they were still making it, No Midnight Blues and Time To Let Go, and both ended up on the finished record. For the album itself the band turned to the Estonian crowdfunding platform Hooandja, where 70 backers paid for a physical pressing.
The band were direct about what the money was for. Translated from their Hooandja page, they wrote:
“We are making a cassette, a USB stick, a CD, and if the project goes especially well, then of course vinyl too.”
That is a specific ambition for a first record. Most independent bands in 2021 shipped to streaming and stopped. This one raised money to put the album on four physical formats.
The Credits Are Long, Which Is Also A Catalogue Fact
The crowdfunding ran through the spring of 2021, and the band told their backers they hoped to have the record out by July. It arrived in October. A three-month slip on a first album is unremarkable. Still, it is the kind of detail a singles run never generates, because a single is finished when the band says it is.
The credits name the whole line-up, and the line-up has not moved. Kristi Täheste sings. Grigori Rõžuk plays guitars, piano and backing vocals. Margus Pärnamägi plays bass. Henrik Heinmets plays drums and percussion and sings. Endrik Salak guests on vocals on Alone, and Madis Kreevan supplied a sample for Make Out.
The production credits run just as long. Keijo Koppel, Lennart Pihl and Endrik Salak recorded and produced it. Michael Eisenstein mixed and mastered it. Sören Talu did the cover art and Martin Hiis the album design. For a self-funded debut from a four-piece, that is a lot of names, and it is the clearest sign that the band treated this record differently from everything around it.
What Changed On The Album
Ten tracks, forty-three minutes. That is a placement decision as much as a musical one, because a band that has only ever released singles has never had to sequence anything.
The record uses the room. Underdog opens at 4:16. Pain Before The Pleasure runs to 6:16, the longest thing here by more than a minute and a half. Kurt Cobain is the shortest at 3:02. In Cold Blood and Cuckoo sit in the middle at around four and a half minutes each. On a singles run those lengths would not exist, because a standalone track has to earn its play inside three.
The band describe themselves as rock-psychedelic on their crowdfunding page and as hard rock elsewhere. Both are defensible across ten tracks. What holds is the shape: blues-weighted rhythm underneath, a vocal carrying the melody, and enough space in the longer songs for the guitars to go somewhere.
For placement, the useful comparisons are contemporary rather than historic. Halestorm is the closest lane, female-fronted hard rock built on a rhythm section that stays heavy under a melodic vocal. Hole is the other pole, and it is the band’s own reference rather than a critic’s.
Where To Hear Who Needs Truth Anyway, And What Came After
The catalogue did not stop in 2021. New Old Ways followed, then Emoción, both pushed from the band’s own channels rather than through a label cycle. So the singles habit resumed the moment the album was done. That is the honest through-line: this is a band that works in singles and made one album because enough people paid for it.
RockCharts.News’s curator team on why it earned a slot:
“Eleven singles, then one album, funded by seventy people who wanted it on cassette. The record is worth hearing, but the catalogue around it is the story. Bands that only release singles rarely commit to a forty-three-minute sequence, and this one did it once, deliberately.”
You can hear the album on Spotify, Apple Music and SoundCloud, and buy it on Bandcamp.
Follow No More Fridays on their YouTube channel, Facebook and Instagram, where they usually post the newest single first.
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