No Soap Radio’s namesake is rooted in absurdity: a punchline that refuses to arrive, a story that deliberately goes nowhere. The band themselves, though, seem intent on making a habit of going somewhere entirely their own.

“[That band name] was the second or third thing that came to mind when we were kids, and it stuck,” explained Drew Coll, the band’s lead guitarist, who plays the instrument alongside Jay Blezow. “And it turns out, there are a few No Soap Radios out there.” 

The imposters in question are a self-proclaimed “headbanger jazz” band hailing from Portland, Oregon, and a real-life New Jersey rock band that appeared as a cameo act on The Sopranos.

“And that one’s painful because it’s New Jersey; we can’t even lie because we were, like, four [years old],” Coll joked.

Jersey’s (and New York’s) No Soap Radio distinguishes itself from the bunch by flaunting a prog/indie/math rock sound, one that fans of Paramore, Water from Your Eyes, or Lip Critic will find familiar. Despite being friends since their teenage years, with most of the band having met at School of Rock, the band’s recent activity is three years overdue.

“I’m not a lot younger, but I’ve always been the baby,” Jake Rubenstein, the band’s drummer, admitted. The statement, though, is not far from the truth: when No Soap Radio first started jamming, Rubenstein was only 12 years old. Lately, he’s been at school in Boston, making time to play shows whenever he was in New York City or its shadow, New Jersey. “It’s awesome how we’ve stayed together. Home base has been Boston for me for five years at this point. In those five years, we’ve recorded an album and a live session and played a bunch of gigs. So, we’ve been playing pretty steadily for a while. I don’t know what it is about us coming back together, like in this new album or new songs that we’re playing, but we just decided like, ‘All right, we have a critical mass of songs. Let’s do it.’”

The first step in empty-nesting their demo catalogue came in the form of three live sessions for songs “NICE TRY,” “QUIT,” and “RAGE,” all three of which were filmed by Kelp Digital and are now available on streaming platforms in an EP called Live from the Garage. These sessions serve as No Soap Radio’s own versions of a Tiny Desk concert, where each member gets screen time while the overall cohesiveness of the group shines.

“We put in a lot of work on the last album,” explained lead singer Erica Lynch, “and so we really wanted to use that up and have as many people listen to it as possible, while Jake also probably didn’t have the bandwidth to help us make another album while he was finishing up his last bit of school. But in the meantime, it allowed us to basically come up with a new sound essentially. These songs that we have now that are in the live session, they’re completely different from the other stuff that we had previously.”

Riley Coll, Drew’s sister and the band’s bassist, added, “Every time we have these little breaks where we’re not all in the same place, so we’re not playing as many shows or doing as much, Drew and Erica are still working and writing songs. Drew just comes up with these increasingly more complicated bass parts every time he’s doing a song, so at least for me, the difference in what I’m able to do between three years ago on the last album and this year is way different. It’s cool.” 

Drew Coll is, in a sense, the band’s composer, sketching out the sonic architecture that gives the other members a foundation to stand on. Elaborating on shaping this new sound and collaborating lyrically with Lynch, he said, “I just try to avoid the last album; I just don’t want it to sound like one of our old songs. Not that I don’t like our old songs, but you want to keep it interesting. And then a lot of it is also writing around lyrical ideas or concepts. Where before, with Erica specifically, there’s a bare-bones structure, and then Erica and I get on the phone and throw ideas at each other for three hours.” 

This upcoming project also funnels the different angles that the bandmates view life, both personally and musically. From paying rent and bills to simply listening to opposing styles of music, each member channels their own experiences into the art.

Musically, the band pulls from some unexpected artists. Rubenstein, as the drummer, cited Brazilian and Jamaican music, more nichely the genres of dancehall, dubstep, and old reggae. Drew Coll listens to “crazier shit”—in the words of Rubenstein—that prompted Lynch to ask, “Drew, what are those spotted people that you listen to?”

The “spotted people” in question are viral Angine de Poitrine, a French Canadian anonymous duo that experiments with microtones and recently made their late-night debut on Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show. More normally, other inspiration comes from musicals like Rent and Hadestown (said Drew Coll), the classics like Pink Floyd and Vulfpeck (added Riley Coll), and even iconic Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams (Lynch named).

“I think that our experiences have changed a lot,” Lynch said. “From that last album, we were just getting our start into adulthood. We were still trying to grow out of high school in that album. And then this new project is like, ‘Okay, we’ve experienced life, and there are some qualms I have about things that I’m experiencing.’” 

“RAGE,” for instance, is about hating your boss—an experience that most people can intimately relate to. “QUIT” laments wanting, or not wanting, to quit nicotine.

For Lynch, the ideal audience isn’t necessarily the biggest one—though that’s always a plus—but it’s one that has their heart in it. “I wouldn’t want a room full of people who don’t care about our music,” she said. “I would want people who care.”

It’s a modest measure of success, but an honest one, and their measure of longevity is not the number of streams or the size of the venue, but something simpler: to keep showing up, to let music remain as its own kind of antidote to life. “I feel like just still playing together in any capacity, whether it’s once every six months or I don’t know— as long as we are still making music, that is success,” said Riley Coll.

But, of course, they also hope the music leaves an impression. As Drew Coll succinctly summarizes, “I want people to go, ‘Wow, that was fucking sick.’” 

Images taken from Instagram, @nosoapradio_, and by Rafael Moy Lee | Interviewed on August 12, 2026