After nearly twenty years, Souls For Sale will finally be unleashed. Read more below.
There’s something strangely poetic about a band vanishing just before their defining work gets finished. It’s the kind of thing that happens in books or documentaries, not usually in sleepy Northern Ontario towns- but that’s exactly what happened with No Arrow. Almost two decades after the group’s quiet disbanding, their long-lost album Souls For Sale is finally being released to the public, thanks to a little patience, a lot of digging, and a shared belief that no business should be left unfinished. On 21 July 2025, MorningStar Records will officially release Souls For Sale on CD and vinyl, dragging No Arrow’s driving, experimental grunge from the vault into the daylight.
No Arrow were a band that never quite fit the mold, even during their active years. Formed in Sault Ste. Marie in 2005 under the name Murder Playground, they carved out a noisy corner in the local scene, veering between heavy alternative, dirty grunge, and an almost punk-level commitment to their sound. Led by Dann Pichette on guitar and vocals, Joe Falco on drums, and a rotating cast of bassists (four by most counts), No Arrow were messy, loud, ambitious, and constantly shifting shape. That inconsistency became part of their charm- and part of the reason their only album never got released.
Sessions for Souls For Sale were launched in 2006, scrapped multiple times, and eventually re-recorded from the ground up between 2008 and 2009. What survived is a mosaic of intensity and passion. Two different bassists play on it. Entire tracks were built on drum parts meant for other material. One bassist, Harley Syrette, recorded his parts after technically quitting the band. The group was running on fumes; using borrowed mics, a Behringer mixer, and whatever recording gear they could amass. At one point, they were using nothing but a couple Shure mics, a ribbon mic someone brought in randomly, and whatever gear their friend Mike Yakosovich could loan them; pedals, headphones, even a 12-string electric. Despite all of this, or maybe because of it, the album is weirdly cohesive. It doesn’t sound clean, but it sounds real.
This is not a flawless record. You can hear the imperfections. The guitar fuzz angrily cuts through a wall of sound. The vocals are strained and pissed off in the best possible way. Some of the songs feel like they’re holding together by willpower alone, and others take strange detours you don’t expect from a band that could’ve gone the predictable post-grunge route. But they didn’t. They wrote from instinct. The result is something that sounds closer to a basement-tape masterpiece than a studio-polished alt-rock product. The track Substitute Victim was rebuilt entirely from a leftover drum track, originally meant for a song called Hectic that never happened. There’s even word that a video game developer once considered using an instrumental of Sikkha. None of it feels tidy, but none of it feels fake either. Mastering duties back in 2009 went to UK producer Chris Daniels- yes, the same Chris Daniels who once remixed Gloria Estefan and built a cult following in the UK underground. Every song on the album cost £50 to master back then (worth about $140 CAD in today’s terms), which reflects the band's commitment to doing it right, even if the sessions felt anything but professional at the time.
No Arrow quietly dissolved following a brief reunion in 2011, its members slowly drifting into other projects. Frontman Dann Pichette went on to record with SBD. The live footage, scattered promo videos, and old MySpace clips live on in various corners of the internet, but still, Souls For Sale matters. The album never got a fair shot when it was supposed to, but maybe now, in 2025, it has a chance to hit people the way it should have the first time around.
No Arrow weren’t perfect. Their covers could be hit or miss, and their lineup changed more often than some bands change guitar strings. But when it worked, it really worked. Their energy was honest, their sound was heavy and a little unhinged, and they belonged to that rare class of bands that lives on in local scene folklore, despite their defining work never seeing a release. Until now, that is.
Souls For Sale drops July 21 on the MorningStar Records Webstore.