One chord, four stabs and you’re in. This simple yet instantly recognisable intro kicks off No One Knows, a 21st century rock behemoth that made stars of its performers, Queens Of The Stone Age, and introduced a festival-ready singalong riff that’s as beloved today as it’s ever been.
No One Knows was the lead single from the band’s third album, 2002’s Songs For The Deaf. The album found the Californian band teaming up with alt-rock icon Dave Grohl on drums with spectacular results, and cemented QOTSA band leader Josh Homme as one of the purest rock star frontmen of the new millennium. Aided by a suitably surreal music video, No One Knows became an alternative radio mainstay, and was quickly established as the definitive QOTSA song.
A version of the No One Knows riff first appeared in Cold Sore Superstars, a song from Homme’s highly collaborative Desert Sessions project of 2001.
Speaking to biographer Joel McIver, Homme revealed that the band had been working on No One Knows for some time prior to recording.
“We have patience with music,” Homme said, “a year or five years down the road it may kind of rewrite itself and become what it's supposed to be.”
Most of the track’s staying power comes from its iconic, unusual riff, which Homme plays staccato in C standard tuning (C F Bb Eb G C).
The riff consists of the C minor octave powerchord shape, with the addition of your pinky finger moving from the 10th-fret F note to the 8th-fret D# note on the second (G) string, and then down to the 9th-fret C note on the third (Eb) string.
Each of these descending patterns, played within the powerchord shape, repeats twice, and each bar ends with a short slide down the fretboard before releasing the bottom open C string.
As the song moves into the first verse, Homme’s haunting, seductive falsetto reels off bizarre, trippy lyrics: “We get these pills to swallow/How they stick in your throat/Tastes like gold.”
The song then explodes into its chorus, with Grohl putting in one of his all-time best performances behind the kit, and an additional guitar track (played live by Troy Van Leeuwen) thickens out the distortion for maximum impact.
Dissecting the song on his YouTube channel, The Darkness’ Justin Hawkins commented: “In a modern rock song, when the guitars come in, they’re [often] hard-panned, and it creates this huge, spacious, mega-saturated thing. [QOTSA] have done that on here, but it’s such a nasty sound – it doesn’t feel like a Weezer song, it doesn’t have that hi-fi quality. It’s just huge and human-sounding.”
After another verse and chorus, No One Knows veers off into a crunchy middle-8 section, with more outrageous drumming by Grohl, before cutting out completely for a surprise isolated bass solo by Nick Oliveri. The rest of the band then rejoin for Homme’s woozy guitar solo, backed by Beastlesque orchestral strings.
Speaking to Matt Sweeney for his Guitar Moves YouTube series in 2013, Homme claimed: “Guitar solos to me should be a really articulate way to make fun of guitar solos. My guitar solo… it’s gotten to nonsense. And sometimes they sound like nonsense, but they’re played on purpose.”
After a final, stripped-back verse, the song ends just as it begins, with one extra chord stab to see it off.
No One Knows has a timeless quality to it, largely due to its difficulty to categorise.
Though particularly hard-hitting, it bucked the trend of many heavier rock songs of the day – the production is warm and live-sounding, and the guitars are thick without relying on 7-string gut-punch.
Homme’s falsetto, meanwhile, is a world away from Limp Bizkit or Linkin Park.
Working alongside co-producer Eric Valentine, the band achieved the distinctive sound in No One Knows with some interesting studio tricks.
Speaking to Rick Beato about the album’s mix, Valentine said: “There’s a very extreme compartmentalisation of frequencies going on on this record. The guitars are all mid-range. Josh was obsessed with this 600-to-700 Hz range. It forced the drums to be a little more scooped-out sounding.”
The notably dead drum sound was captured by having Grohl record his cymbals separately. Grohl hit electronic cymbal pads whilst recording acoustic drums, and vice versa, so that his playing could match up as accurately as possible.
Speaking to Rhythm magazine, Valentine discussed this unusual approach: "Having cymbal pads to hit made it easier for Dave to play the way he normally would. It did sound pretty ridiculous before we replaced the cymbal samples with the real ones.
“After the drums were recorded, we set up to record just the cymbals. We set up a dummy snare and toms that were padded to be as quiet as possible. This way he could simply replay the same drum parts and only have the cymbals be captured by the mics.”
Valentine also shared his admiration for Grohl’s finesse behind the kit
“The thing that is most striking about Dave's playing is how consistently he hits the drums. He plays very hard, which in a lot of cases does not necessarily result in the best drum sound. [But] because Grohl hits so consistently it is much easier to accommodate the really hard playing.
“I have heard people speculate that there are samples layered in with the drum recording. There are definitely no samples. Grohl just plays with inhuman consistency.”
Historically, QOTSA have been fairly coy about their gear. Homme’s preferred guitars around this time included obscure models such as the Ovation Ultra GP and the Gibson Marauder, as well as a Maton MS500, which can be seen in the song’s video.
For pedals, Homme has been known to use the Boss SD-1 Super Overdrive and a Fulltone FatBoost FB-3, amongst others.
Speaking to Sound On Sound, Valentine said: “We went to this second-hand music store called Black Market Music – it was like a graveyard for broken, old, crappy equipment – and just bought all of the shittiest stuff they had. I was just putting mics in different places to try and pull sounds out of these amps that weren’t particularly hi-fi or explosive sounding by themselves, but with enough manipulation you could get something to happen.”
This use of vintage, undesirable gear in a creative manner is responsible for both the album’s signature tones and the difficulty others find trying to recreate them. Or as Hawkins puts it: “There’s something about a shit guitar played through a shitty old amp that you just can’t beat.”
In an interview with Tenacious D’s Kyle Gass for Guitarings, Homme stated that he’s used an Ampeg VT-40 since he was 13 years old.
“I’ve always liked to use the wrong shit incorrectly,” he continued. “I don’t have a Marshall and I don’t have a Les Paul. There’s nothing wrong with those things, but I just figured, ‘Ok, they’re covered.’”
For those trying to recreate Homme’s blown-out distorted sounds, a major boost in accuracy has arrived in the recently released Peavey Too 10w practice amp, modelled after the amplifier that Homme considered his “secret weapon” for years.
A memorable video for No One Knows was created by Dean Karr and future Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind director Michel Gondry, and depicts Homme, Oliveri and frequent QOTSA vocalist Mark Lanegan driving through the desert and hitting a deer, only for it to rise up, knock the band unconscious and commit grand theft auto, taking them hostage for more late-night hijinks.
The narrative is cut with the band performing in all their might against a sinister black backdrop, with Homme’s licks, Oliveri’s solo and Grohl’s thunderous fills on full display.
The video got everything right about QOTSA’s presentation; its macabre yet darkly funny narrative and tough, no-frills performance were a perfect representation of the band’s outsider charm and pre-social media mystique, and it would find heavy rotation on music channels such as Kerrang! and MTV2.
No One Knows was released as a single in November 2002, three months after Songs For The Deaf, and reached No.1 on both the UK Rock and Metal charts and US Alternative Airplay.
By this time, the album had already gone Platinum in the UK, by January 2003 would be certified Gold in the US.
No One Knows was nominated for a Grammy award in 2003 (their first of nine to date), but would ironically lose out to All My Life by Grohl’s Foo Fighters.
Since its live debut, No One Knows has become a staple of the QOTSA repertoire. Setlist.fm shows that No One Knows is the band’s second-most played song after Songs For The Deaf’s second single, Go With The Flow. No One Knows has been used as a set opener, played in the encore, and just about everywhere in between.
Appearing on the Tuna on Toast With Stryker podcast, Homme said: “I understand that I’m always going to play No One Knows because I still like playing that song and that’s something that it’s an agreement with the audience. Acting like a song that a lot of people like is a burden is just a strange reaction to the gift that your fans have given you.”
Summing up his thoughts on the song, Hawkins offered a glowing appraisal: “This song is one of the few tracks from that period of the Noughties that really is original. It’s got great drums parts on it and a brilliant video, a good-looking singer with a lovely, soft falsetto voice and a super distinctive sonic signature. Of course it was gonna be a hit, it’s fucking obvious!”
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