On a night at SXSW in Austin two months ago, Ratboys members Julia Steiner, Dave Sagan, Marcus Nuccio and Sean Neumann sat together at a vegan BBQ truck stationed in front of Cheer Up Charlie’s. It was almost midnight, as the clear-skied night cracked open and an aperture of neon washed over the entire venue. but everything came together so perfectly under the sparkle of a Texan evening, as the light pollution ensconced the whole joint just right.
Ratboys began 13 years ago in South Bend at the University of Notre Dame, where Steiner and Sagan were studying. Making music together in dorm rooms, we thought sounded good and showing it to our friends.” Fast forward to a decade and nine drummers later, and you’ll find the quartet deeply immersed in their own mountainous groove. Sagan noted that a big part of the work now is building an infrastructure to play music they’re proud of and can make a living off of it, too.
“We’re definitely focused on trying to make it sustainable and do it as well as possible,” Nuccio, who’s been with Ratboys since 2017 and also drums in local groups Pet Symmetry, What Gives and The Please & Thank Yous, chimed in. It made sense that we were gathered at High Road’s showcase at that very moment, given how they became such an integral part of Ratboys’ evolution from a strictly DIY band six years ago. “We were still booking everything ourselves,” Neumann, who became the band’s permanent bassist in 2016.
Steiner had graduated from Notre Dame a year before Sagan—who was finishing a five-year program— taking shelter at her parents’ house in Kentucky before settling down in Chicago. Steiner was in the city, she and Sagan made the first Ratboys album, “AOID”. “We recorded sporadically, whenever Dave was able to come home,” she said. “We recorded “AOID” in a shared practice space, so [through the walls] you could hear other bands practicing. So I recorded all the vocals for that record in the middle of the night when no one else was there.”
Keeping company with peers like Dowsing, NNAMDÏ and Sinai Vessel, the band found a place within the local emo scene—eventually signing with famed emo label Topshelf Records—despite their tunes being a pastiche of pop-punk, indie-folk and outlaw country. In 2021, they celebrated that era by releasing “Happy Birthday, Ratboy”, an album where they re-recorded songs from their 2011 “RATBOY” EP and other origin-story-era gems.
Sometimes you gotta dig deep, but that’s how we started.” More than any other band working right now, Ratboys are emblematic of Heartland rock ‘n’ roll; a quartet more than comfortable staying put in the place they cut their teeth in, no matter what. Ratboys have now been together for more than a decade, a story that began in 2010 when frontwoman Julia Steiner and guitarist Dave Sagan met at Notre Dame freshman orientation and, soon after, recorded a cover of “Spiderweb” by the Champaign-Urbana slacker-rock project Easter. Since then, their band has evolved into a full-time four-piece line-up, and their marriage of noisy indie rock and alt-country has shifted and evolved. Their new album “The Window” is another stage in that evolution. It’s their first to be recorded collaboratively from start to finish, and the new coming-together lends it a triumphant, expansive sound.
For 10 years, the band’s lifeblood has been their impeccable live-show reputation.
“We’re all just deeply addicted to everything that goes into being a band. Playing live and having that connection with people over art, that shared interaction, is the best thing on Earth. Recording and making music that wasn’t there before is, literally, magic,” Steiner concluded.
Ratboys—are one of the few remaining acts of their time with so much left to give. They haven’t stretched their potential too thin by always being in the limelight with a gazillion releases. No, instead, they tour often and take their time making standalone albums that fuck exponentially.
“The Window”, Ratboys’ upcoming fifth album. It was on the horizon a month ago—and many critics had collectively clocked the band’s release of “Black Earth, Wi” and its “record on the way” energy—but things were still being kept under wraps when they took to Austin. Now, “The Window” closes the book on a near-two-year marathon of shows in America and Europe, as the band took to the road, once quarantine lifted, to give “Printer’s Devil” the celebration it deserved in 2020. Now more than ever, Ratboys are now on everyone’s radar; their pedigree vaulted even further into the echelons of Midwestern excellence after Walmart used their 2021 single “Go Outside” in a commercial.
The 11 tracks on “The Window” are something of a real majesty. Ratboys zero in on everything they do exceptionally well and put it in a blender. Steiner’s songwriting, in particular, is at a pinnacle—which says a lot, given how dense and heavy and immaculate “Printer’s Devil” was, the demos for which were tracked in the emptied rooms of her childhood home in Louisville after it was sold. Somewhere on the spectrum in-between Rilo Kiley and Wildflowers-era Tom Petty, Ratboys have made it to a place in their own artistry where they have ample reserves of courage to execute risks.
Steiner returns to window imagery on the album often, as it’s one of the few motifs that properly captures the helplessness and isolation of quarantine, which undoubtedly shaped much of this album. Being pent up inside, where else did we have to turn but towards our small glimpse at the hope still moving next to us? But, instead of looking over her shoulder and considering what’s growing beyond the panes, Steiner is on the outside peering in, still grieving and sketching the pieces of her past unshaken by the crumbling world encased all around it. And from those reflections comes sirens of hope. “So take this part of me / Carry it with you / Wherever it leads / Don’t be scared,” she sings during “The Window.”
Rather than adopting the steadfast, Ratboys sound by steamrolling through emo directions and country chords, Steiner takes those textures on “The Window” and uses them to embellish her own love for catchy pop music through elaborate, balmy and well-crafted choruses.
There is no overarching concept to “The Window“; it’s Steiner and the crew honing their craft by installing past doorways onto new frames: The infectious, raucous “Crossed That Line” was written for a friend’s short film about a fictional punk band (which didn’t end up getting made); “I Want You (Fall 2010)” is Steiner’s delicate ode to a decade-long companionship with Sagan that ends in a cheeky Midwest emo riff; “Morning Zoo” is the best country-rock song you’ll hear this summer; “Empty” features introductory, distorted vocalizations reminiscent of “Molly.”
“The Window” was produced by Chris Walla, the Death Cab for Cutie bassist When Foxing toured for their Walla-produced 2018 album “Nearer My God“, Ratboys opened shows for them—which is how they got linked up with Walla to begin with, at their gig in Montreal.
The warm, vintage, band-in-a-room rawness of “Black Earth, Wi” was not a one-off. All of “The Window” embraces that sonic presentation, as—per Walla’s guidance—Ratboys recorded the entire album straight to tape and built the foundational sound of the project off of that technique. “The songs themselves are pretty stylistically all over the map, but that fidelity makes any song sound better—whether it’s a rock song or a folk song,” Beyond Sagan’s absurd, career-defining guitar solo, “Black Earth, Wi” is the epitome of what Ratboys are.
“The Window” is out August 25th via Topshelf Records.
The Fat Angel Sings 