Truly, One of the Best Rock Bands of the '90s and Right Now
Have you heard?
Wake up little girl, you’re killing that world!
Forget about the words, think about the hurt,
And don’t let it die.
Formed in 1990 by songwriter Robert Roth, Screaming Trees drummer Mark Pickerel, and Soundgarden cofounder Hiro Yamamoto, Truly put out two killer albums in the 1990s, and another in 2000, before they went on hiatus.
But in January 2025, the band started recording new music at Studio X, on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. Then in March, they toured the U.S. to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their incredible debut album, Fast Songs...From Kid Coma. They kicked things off in Portland, Oregon and played their hometown of Seattle the following night.
It’s funny. When I told one of my oldest friends that I was seeing Truly play last week, he never even knew that Yamamoto had another band after Soundgarden. As kids, my friends and I saw countless shows during the ’90s, and we were huge Soundgarden fans, and somehow I only discovered Truly in the early 2000s. How did that happen?
What’s interesting about being a ’90s kid and Truly fan is that, unlike many bands who emerged during the so-called “alternative era,” their music doesn’t sound like any era. As the best rock ‘n’ roll does, Truly feels timeless, having incubated in the strange, singular world that musicians create among themselves, rather than in the periods that historians use to mark time.
That timeless character makes the name of their current “Then, Today, Tomorrow” tour even more resonant. As one of best bands from the ’90s, Truly comes from everywhere at once.
Truly’s Origin
In 1984, in rainy western Washington, the brothers John and Robert Roth recorded a cassette with two musicians named Evan Schiller and Jim Stonecipher, under the name The BridgeTown. John played guitar. Robert sang lead and played bass. Three of those four guys reconfigured as a new band, named The Storybook Krooks. In 1989, they recorded an album in their basement, on a four-track tape machine, though only four songs surfaced. Then, as bands do, they broke up. The timing was good.
That same year, Nirvana was searching for a rhythm guitarist to fill out their sound. They’d briefly hired a talented, brooding guitarist named Jason Everman to tour with them, but they’d decided to let him go.
Kurt Cobain asked Steve Turner from Mudhoney to join, but Turner told Cobain they sounded better as a trio. Expanding their sound remained an enduring interest, because years later, Cobain even asked Dinosaur Jr frontman J Mascis to join—twice. Eventually Germs guitarist Pat Smear joined. But in 1989, Robert Roth auditioned to join Nirvana.
“So the week that [Storybook Krooks] had broken up, I was riding the bus—the Queen Anne in downtown Seattle—and Jonathan [Poneman] was on the bus,” Roth said in Greg Prato’s book Grunge Is Dead. “I moved next to him and we were chatting. He’s like, ‘What’s going on with the band?’ And I told him we just broke up a few days ago. And he was like, ‘Well, this is top secret, but Nirvana is half kicking out Jason [Everman] and he’s half quiting. Basically Jason is not working out and they’re looking for another guitar player who can write.’”
When Roth ran into Cobain at a TAD show a few weeks later, Cobain told him, “When we get back from tour I’ll call you and let’s get together and play.”
“And I was like, ‘Well, by the time you guys get back from the tour I’ll probably be doing something else. So if you’re serious about wanting to play together, let’s do it before you leave.”
Wise move.
“They ended up hauling all their equipment up to [Storybook Krook’s] rehearsal space and we got together and played for probably three or four hours,” Roth told Prato. “It was incredible, because I had never played with guys that loud before in my life. It blew me away. Changed my life. I went to a much bigger ampn and a much bigger cabinet after that Krist was miking his bass cabinet, they were miking the kick drum, and this was just to try me out so that they’d get a rehearsal in.” They played a few tunes from Nirvana’s debut Bleach and one of Roth’s originals. “Then we just kind of jammed and made noise and played riffs, and that was a blast.”
Nirvana eventually decided to continue playing as a trio, but as Roth had predicted, he was already on to something else.
The same week that Roth received the news about Nirvana was the same week that his drummer friend Mark Pickerel joined him in the project that became Truly.
Pickerel had co-founded Screaming Trees with high school friends. The Trees were as brilliant as they were turbulent. After recording their sixth album, Uncle Anesthesia, in 1990, Pickerel left in search of his next venture.
“At that point, I was just going to go in and record a solo record,” Roth said in Grunge Is Dead, “and Mark ended up quitting the Screaming Trees that week. The guy who was playing bass at the time, Chris Quinn, quit his band that day. So once we got to the studio, we realized, ‘Oh we’re a band.’ I already had a song called ‘Truly.’ Chris said, ‘How about calling the band Truly?’ Mark was at work, and [Sub Pop cofounder] Jonathan Poneman said, ‘Why don’t you call your band Truly?’ Two different people came up with the same name — I figured that was fate.”
When guitarist Chris Quinn switched from bass to guitar, Pickerel called his friend Hiro Yamamoto to fill their open bass position.
Yamamato cofounded Seattle’s legendary Soundgarden, but in 1989, he’d quit the band. As his friends skyrocketed to fame as Grunge icons, he eventually completed his master’s degree in physical chemistry at Western Washington University. But after returning from Soundgarden’s 1989 Europe tour, he layed low in Seattle and took a breather.
“I was out of music for a while,” Yamamoto said in Grunge Is Dead, “I just didn’t want to play. I was pretty tired of it. Mark called me, and said, ‘I’m playing with this guy, and we’re looking for a bass player.’ I was like, ‘OK, I’ll give it a shot.’ …I listened to their stuff, and was like, ‘This is kinda cool.’”
Yamamato had moved from Chicago to Seattle with his guitarist friend Kim Thayil in 1981. The two scraped by, got involved with the city’s musical underworld, and Thayil went to college. In Yamamoto’s apartment in 1984, he and his new drummer friend Chris Cornell would jam late into the night, writing bits of songs on bass and drums. When they invited Thayil over to join, he contributed imaginative riffs to what became early Soundgarden songs.
“The first time we jammed, we wrote three songs,” Thayil remembered in Mark Yarm’s fantastic oral history of Grunge. “The very next day, we wrote two more.” Soundgarden played their first show as a trio in 1984, with Cornell singing while drumming.
In those protean years, Seattle was home to all sorts of inventive, weird bands like U-Men, Malfunkshun, 64 Spiders, and Fastbacks. Early Soundgarden had an intense, experimental energy. They mixed avante guard ambient elements with riff-rock that pulled as much from the SST roster as it did bands like Bauhaus and Killing Joke. Just as Black Flag slowed punk rock on their album My War, Soundgarden started slowing their heavist songs to a sludgy pace. Soundgarden’s songs like “Beyond the Wheel” and “Nothing to Say” blugeoned listeners and paved the way for what the world called “Grunge.” They even left their own Seattle friends’ heads spinning: How could any band be this heavy? Where people eventually heard Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath in their music, these young friends were initially listening to punk rock, British post-punk, and new wave, not power-chord rock.
“When I listen to myself play bass, even back then,” Yamamoto said in 2010, “I have kind of a dark way of playing. In that sense, it was kind a quirkier music. It was definitely more new wave. But there was a darkness to it.”
In Truly, he paired that darkness with Roth’s unique, psychedelic sensibility and unconventional song structures.
Soundgarden released their Screaming Life EP on Sub Pop in 1988. They released their full-length debut, Ultramega OK, on SST, the underground label run by Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn, whose roster included Meat Puppets and Hüsker Dü. In a cool twist, it was Mark Pickerel who helped them land there. In 1987, Screaming Trees and Soundgarden opened for Faith No More, inside Central Washington University’s Student Union Building, in Ellensburg. The Trees’ soundman, Rob Doak, taped the set through the soundboard to get a clean recording. But apparently, as legend has it, Pickerel sent the tape to Greg Ginn. Despite these arty origins, Soundgarden’s music, and Cornell’s incredible voice and stage presence, earned them a record deal with the commercial A&M label in 1989. But the label’s plans for the band and their album Louder Than Love didn’t sit well with Yamamoto.
“I was kind of a D-I-Y punker,” the bassist said. “We did it for the people, you know, and I’ve always had that ethos.”
When A&M started talking about marketing and touring to build their audience, he had concerns.
“A&M is telling us, ‘We want you to tour like 10 months. You gotta go out and hit the road,’” Yamamoto said in Everybody Loves Our Town. “That was more than I wanted, but I told the guys, ‘Look, we got to where we are by making our own choices, and now we’re on this major label and they’re tellin’ us this stuff. We don’t have to do what they tell us.’ I didn’t want to live on the road. …The label wanted to sell us to heavy-metal stations. I thought we were different than that. Sure, I’d like to sell a million records and live in a castle and not have to work, but at the same time, I want to be able to say, ‘This is me. I’m not just part of a mass-marketing machine.’ Maybe I’m being naive, but when we got to that point where we’re on the major label, you’re a product. You might as well be Ivory Snow or Clorox bleach.”
Well, that philosophy worked well, because Yamamoto, Roth, and Pickerel created powerful sounds together—and they’re still creating decades later!
In Truly, Robert switched from bass to lead guitar, and his song-writing clicked.
“My dad would always say some people make decisions on their ethics and they suffer for them, but they are the courageous ones,” Yamamoto said in 2018, after getting inducted into the Asian Hall of Fame. “And that almost makes me cry.”
Truly played their first show in 1990, opening for The Jesus Lizard.
In 1991, they released their debut Heart and Lungs EP on Sub Pop. It was the only time they recorded as a four-piece.
Guitarist named Chris Quinn left soon after. He and Roth didn’t exactly jive.
“I’m more of an intuitive type,” Roth once said, “he’s more a studied type.”
In 1992, the trio got a great opportunity: They joined the second Lollapalooza tour, playing on the smaller second stage. After the first tour’s success, the second Lollapalooza was even bigger and better run. By change, Soundgarden was a headliner that year. The second stage was great exposure for up-and-coming bands like Cypress Hill and Rage Against the Machine, and it put Truly in front of the young listeners than defined this neatly packaged “alternative era.”
And yet somehow, Truly still stayed underground.
After a two-song single in 1993 and a four-song teaser in 1995, Truly hit us with their full-length debut Fast Stories…From Kid Coma, in 1995. It’s 13 songs stretch for 72 minutes, and some of us fans still wish it was twice as long. It took five years to complete, and it’s their masterpiece.
Brimming with creativity, layers of sounds, and refreshing oddities, the songs highlight Roth’s inventive guitar playing and slide work. Yamamoto’s driving rhtymic sensibility and imagination pair seamlessly with Pickerel’s perfect mix of thunder, delicacy, and his sense of space.
Any marketer can see this band’s pedigree and go Ah, a post-Grunge supergroup! But Truly is not a Grunge band or a supergroup. It’s a collaboration. And Yamamoto’s concerns about disingenuous product marketing still resonate today, because marketing terms can distract you from how the music sounds and how it makes you feel.
Roth is a skilled songwriter, and each band member contributes their own musical personalities to the songs Roth creates. Fast Stores…From Kid Coma is a heavy psychedelic rock sound, written loosely around around a character named Kid Coma.
“The band’s focal point is Robert Roth, whose dark, semi-mumbled voice (not unlike a sleepy Mark Lanegan), oddly tuned guitar riffs and affection for wheezy vintage keyboards shape an unusual and varied sound. At different points, Truly sounds like it’s from 1974, 1989 and 1999. ...The band’s reference points are fairly obvious (Zeppelin, My Bloody Valentine and all things psychedelic) but never dominant — Truly exists pretty much in its own little world. The droning, low-end riffs contrast nicely with Roth’s soft, multi-layered vocals, and although the elaborate instrumental work sometimes blurs the fine line between clever and stupid, Pickerel’s strong, steady drumming holds it all together in places where a less tasteful player might have driven the band into complete overkill.”
Trouser Press is famously hard to please, so that’s high praise. (And being British, when they eviscerate music, it’s especially articulate and biting. Same with their compliments.)
Roth loves Fast Stories…From Kid Coma. “I really feel it’s an album, in the sense that we weren’t just putting together a collection of songs,” he told Prato. “In our heads, it was like a movie we were making. By the time we made that record, they said things like, ‘Push the envelope – do what you want to do,’ and ‘Don’t worry about singles, don’t worry about hits until the third or fourth record. We want you to be an album band like Pink Floyd or Zeppelin. We’re like, ‘Are you sure?’”
“Some of the songs and lyrics [on Fast Stories] still put a chill down my spine when I hear them” Yamamoto said. “Certain parts of songs just have this feel, and to me, that’s the reason why I always played music — to make that kind of sound.”
Roth’s lyrics leave a mark on you, too. Certain phrases, certain ethereal images—they live in that ethereal space between narrative and impressionism. Some feel like bits of a story you walked in on halfway through. Others invite interpretation that refreshingly never comes clear.
Daisy does… does evening come?
We’re turning away from the sun.
The light connected to the stars
Won’t burn my eyes or break my heart.
Wake up little girl, you’re killing that world!
Forget about the words, think about the hurt!
Truly followed Fast Stories two years later with the Feeling You Up LP. It’s a ripper. Built with the same psychedelic impulse and rhtymic sensibility as their debut, Feeling You Up puts the instruments a bit forward in the mix, giving it a less gauzy, hazy feel with all of the heavy riffing and imaginative guitar solos. Just try not to sing along to this:
Listening to songs like “If You Don’t Let It Die” and “Wait Till the Night” in 2026, it’s hard not to call Truly one of the greatest sleeper bands of the ’90s, but that’s cutting it short. They’re just a stellar band, a mesmerizing band, and that’s why I want you to know about them so you can go see them play.
Truly, Right Now
To celebreate the 30th anniversary of Fast Songs...From Kid Coma, Truly is touring the U.S. It’s their first tour in six years. The band is stoked.
When I saw them play Portland, the musicains were laughing and having as much fun on stage as the audience was off-stage. Roth spilled his drink near Yamamoto’s pedal and snickered. “You can’t take me anywhere.” He introduced their song “Public Access Girls” with the story of its origin—from a time when us 90s kids entertained ourselves late at night watching weird local TV shows.
Yamamoto plays the bass with the same joyful energy he did in the late-80s, kicking out his legs, leaning back euphorically, jumping up and down. He exudes the same youthful energy that you see in Charles Peterson’s iconic Seattle photos. When the crowd clapped, his face lit up. Maybe I’m reading into it, but I take that as evidence that he made the right choice to leave Soundgarden to make music on his terms, while raising a family and having a career.
Pickerel has his own band, Mark Pickerel and the Praying Hands, and runs a shop called Roadtrip Records in his hometown of Ellensburg, Washington. He sat this tour out but is recording with the band.
When Truly went on hiatus, Roth released an incredible solo album, Someone, Somewhere… in 2004. It’s as inventive as anything Truly released and sounds like it could only be his music.
After earning his masters degree in physical chemistry at Western Washington University, Yamamoto went into a new career direction. He worked as Chief of Organic Chemistry at company named Edge Analytical, that tests drinking water for chemicals hexavalent chromium. And on the side, around his other life, he played music with Roth and his friends.
“I’ve got this weird brain,” Yamamoto said in 2018, after getting induced in the Asian Hall of Fame. “I love science and math and weird conceptual quantum mechanics. I can do all kinds of goofy things with math.”
Cheers to that awesome brain and the power of friends to make music.