Ratboys

All Ages
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Ratboys opens its new album, Singin’ to an Empty Chair, with an invitation. “What’s it gonna take to open up this time?” vocalist Julia Steiner sings, launching an 11-song conversation that stands as Ratboys’ most introspective and emotionally driven work yet. Before long, the song swells into the sort of musical sunshower that’s become Ratboys’ specialty, underscoring the high stakes across the band’s sixth album and how gracefully the four-piece navigates them. When Steiner asks the question on “Open Up,” it’s clear she really means it.
Despite its title, Singin’ to an Empty Chair is not defined by what’s missing. Rather, Steiner says, it’s the beginning of an important dialogue. “A big, overarching theme of this record is my attempt to document my experience being estranged from a close loved one,” she says. “The goal is to update this person on what's been going on in my life and to try to bridge that impasse and reach out a hand into the void.”
Singin’ to an Empty Chair, the band’s first album for New West Records, fills that space with nearly an hour of new music showcasing Ratboys at the peak of their powers — twangy, effervescent, and as confident as they’ve ever been.
Emotionally piercing songs like “Just Want You to Know the Truth,” the billowing tale that delivers the album its title lyric, mingle next to bubbly power-pop, delicate Americana, and an exhilarating six-minute detour called “Light Night Mountains All That.” Steiner labels it the band’s “wormhole jam” thanks to guitarist Dave Sagan’s extraterrestrial guitar bloops and its unorthodox time structure. “It soon turned into, like, okay, we gotta granularly break it down and bring out the whiteboard,” Sagan says about the detail that went into the four members’ collaborative process.
It’s no small feat, but luckily, Steiner and Sagan have long been great partners in exploration. The two formed Ratboys in 2010 before rounding out the lineup with bassist Sean Neumann and drummer Marcus Nuccio. “It’s just fun to play music in a room with your friends,” Nuccio says, highlighting the genuine chemistry that’s fueled the band through its worldwide tours. That chemistry took center stage on Ratboys’ previous LP, The Window, which found them operating at their highest level yet, becoming one of 2023’s most-praised albums.
To begin crafting its follow-up, the four members decamped to a 75-acre plot of land in Wisconsin’s Driftless Area to write and demo the new songs – or, as Steiner says, “to make a bunch of ridiculous noise.” Months later, the group reconvened back at the same cabin to begin tracking with co-producer Chris Walla, the band’s trusted collaborator who also produced The Window. After a one-week cabin session, Ratboys and Walla took the songs to Steve Albini’s famed Electrical Audio studios in Chicago, and later to Rosebud Studio in Evanston, Illinois, to finish recording. As such, some songs on Singin’ to an Empty Chair are journeys within themselves, patchworked together from multiple recording sessions across the Midwest. “We wanted to approach this record like it was a quilt,” Neumann says. “We recorded the songs in all these different places, so we approached it in a way where different songs had different scenes. Certain parts of songs were recorded in different spaces, and we switch back and forth between them throughout the record to help tell the story of each song.”