No More Fridays and the Cost of Building Who Needs Truth Anyway Around Its Fifth Track
Ten Tracks, Three Kinds of Rock, and a Running Order That Has to Hold Them
A debut album made by a band with a decade behind it has a problem before anyone presses record. There is more material than the record can take, and it does not all sound the same. No More Fridays released Who Needs Truth Anyway in October 2021 with ten tracks and three rock modes to reconcile. The running order is where that work shows.
No More Fridays have tracks in the playlist below, and every article written about them is collected on the No More Fridays profile. Who Needs Truth Anyway came to this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, the programme that verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Hear it first, then carry on.
What No More Fridays Had to Solve Before Track One
The album blends alternative rock, classic rock and hard rock. Those are not decorative labels. They ask different things of a listener. Alternative rock wants a certain looseness and a vocal that sits close. Classic rock wants a riff that repeats until it means something. Hard rock wants weight and a chorus that arrives on time.
Put ten songs written across a long stretch onto one record and the modes do not distribute evenly. Some run tight. Some run long. The temptation is to lead with the heaviest and let the rest follow.
That order works for a single. It does not work for an album. The second half is then left with nothing to do.
The Longest Song Sits at the Middle, Not the End
Who Needs Truth Anyway solves the problem with a shape rather than a hierarchy. Two songs over four minutes open the record. A shorter one follows. The longest track sits at number five. Then the back half runs short and quick before a longer closer.
That is a deliberate arc. It is also the kind of decision an independent band makes without a label pushing singles to the front.
The centrepiece placement is the clearest choice on the record. Putting the longest track at the midpoint gives the album somewhere to climb to and somewhere to come down from. A closing epic would have turned the first half into a waiting room. Here the first half is doing its own work.
The back half is where the sequencing pays. Three consecutive tracks run close to three minutes each. They are the ones that make the record sound like a band rather than a collection.
Make Out, Alone and Pussycat Carry the Lyric Between the Big Songs
The short songs are load-bearing. Make Out is the pivot at track three, direct and quick after two longer openers. Alone sits at track four and holds the quiet before the album’s longest stretch. Pussycat and Time To Let Go land late, where attention needs shorter songs rather than longer ones.
The titles carry their own signal about where the lyric sits. Make Out, Pussycat, Alone and Time To Let Go are plain and unliterary, and they are mostly about people rather than ideas. That is consistent with a record whose title asks a blunt question and declines to answer it.
A band writing this way needs the arrangement to supply the drama, because the words are not going to reach for it. The running order is what supplies it.
Where No More Fridays Land Beside Garbage and Skunk Anansie
The reference points are not obscure. Garbage built records on the same tension. The vocal stays conversational while the guitars behave like hard rock underneath. Shirley Manson never had to shout to hold a chorus, and the arrangement did the lifting. That balance is what the shorter tracks here are reaching for.
Skunk Anansie are the closer match at the heavier end. They made a career from a European hard rock that keeps an alternative sensibility rather than settling into metal. They did it with a frontwoman carrying songs that change register inside a single verse. That is the working method a band blending three rock modes has to learn.
Neither comparison is a claim about scale. Both are a claim about approach. A listener who keeps those records around will recognise what this one is trying to do.
BestRock.News curator team: “Most independent debuts put the longest song last and hope the listener stays. This one puts it in the middle and earns the back half instead. That is the decision worth noticing, and it is why the album holds together better than its track list suggests.”
Who Needs Truth Anyway is on Spotify, Bandcamp, Apple Music and SoundCloud. The band posts on Instagram, Facebook and their YouTube channel.
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