Ratboys’ 2020 LP “Printer’s Devil” marked the first time the group’s current line-up of Julia Steiner, David Sagan, Sean Neumann, and Marcus Nuccio – wrote an album collaboratively from start to finish, though the entirety of their first headline tour was then cancelled due to COVID. Now for their fifth studio album, the Chicago band recruited producer Chris Walla, who helped realize the widescreen ambition of their tenderly infectious and heartfelt brand of so-called “post-country.” Though “The Window” deals with themes of grief and isolation, the music’s joyful aliveness radiates through not only the band’s tight performances but Steiner’s lyrics, whose unflinching honesty and immediacy spins the white noise of confusion into pure love. “I love this feeling,” she sings looking back on the band’s early days on ‘I Want You” (2010)’. “Burning all my blank CDs never meant so much to me.” In the present, it somehow still feels like the start of forever.
Ratboys “No Way” sounds immediately familiar, as though it’s a song I’ve known for 20+ years but haven’t heard in about 17 years. It’s brand new, but the “it all comes rushing back” happens anyway. I’m not sure what song or songs I’m trying to remember. Is it a particular chord change, something specific about the guitar tone, something about how it swings from loose and casual to emphatic and cathartic? The Ratboys are working firmly within genre here – indie rock with a little alt-country flair – so this kind of mild deja vu is par for the course. The charm of “No Way,” and certainly what makes it interesting beyond mere recognition, is in how the band sound very excited to have written this kind of song.
A song this catchy, a song this easy to click into emotionally, a song that sounds like it’d be fun to play for an audience who knows the words to the chorus. It’s a song that approaches a breakup from two valid positions at once, gracefully moving from befuddled shrug to bold declaration that this sort of thing won’t happen again, or at least with them.
released August 25th, 2023
Written by Ratboys
The Fat Angel Sings 