Ratboys believe in us

That excerpt, from The House at Pooh Corner (1928), comes after Piglet assuages Pooh’s anxiety during a particularly high-drama game of Poohsticks. The more birthdays you bank, the more you start to realise that A. A. Milne’s characters aren’t cute woodland wanderers with funny quirks like addiction and empathy and being sad all the time. Well, they are. But they are also us. And if you don’t feel any kinship whatsoever with Pooh or Piglet or Eeyore, then you might be a bit of a sociopath. Or worse: you won’t enjoy the new album from Ratboys.

The Hundred Acre Wood residents loomed large in the minds of the Chicago quartet – formed by Julia Steiner and Dave Sagan fifteen years ago while enrolled at the University of Notre Dame – as they made Singin’ to an Empty Chair. Ratboys’ sixth album, announced today for release next February, lays its head down in Pooh’s neck of the woods on its closing lullaby, “At Peace in the 100 Acre Wood”. Like “Bad Reaction” from 2023’s widely acclaimed The Window, the song coddles us in a quiet, curative afterglow at the terminus of one helluva journey.

“The song has this pastoral, rural setting – it’s directly inspired by all the Winnie the Pooh stories I read growing up, and the friendship dynamics in those books that are so supportive, pure, and natural,” Steiner, Ratboys’ lead singer, tells me. Over delightful purrs of hammond organ (big up Decemberists’ Jenny Conlee) and guitars that sound like they’re winking at the sun, Steiner exhales some characteristically endearing lines – “Crying in the rain / I’m one with my environment, I’m blending in” – and proceeds to her most solid Pooh-ism yet: “Laugh through the pain / It doesn’t hurt so bad when I’m with my friends.”

Because of the tears, rain, and pain, we probably can’t call this closing track a happily-ever-after, but maybe it’s as close as we can get within an imperfect framework. After all, Empty Chair is Steiner, guitarist Dave Sagan, drummer Marcus Nuccio, and bassist Sean Neumann leaning their weight on each other as they patiently pick away at a world scabbed over with hate and all that horrid stuff. Underneath, they find this indestructible sense of purpose that pairs with not so much acceptance, but a wise and calm making-do – an attitude that’s necessary if we are to comprehend the incomprehensible and support each other as fascism’s rot spreads across the globe.

In Ratboys’ hometown of Chicago, as of this conversation, “it’s been really intense the last few days with ICE just dragging people off the street without arrest warrants,” Steiner says. She and her bandmates are far from sedated bystanders with this stuff: they recently played their second Bernie Sanders rally and – besides the progressive senator’s universal message of it’s not Right versus Left, but top versus down – they admire his surprisingly DIY-punk approach to campaigning. (“It’s so cool – there’s a throughline from punk to Bernie Sanders,” says guitarist Dave Sagan. And fun fact: the person who books bands for Sanders’ rallies, Max Gregor, played in cult ’00s group Lemuria, one of Steiner’s faves.) Ratboys also post regular PSAs and updates on their socials about how we can get involved in resisting the Trump administration’s latest illegal, despotic actions.

While the new album isn’t explicit in addressing topical political chaos, it is fundamentally motivated by it. “The World, So Madly” is a gorgeous, peppy swish of colour that confronts this dilemma of being hopelessly head-over-heels with something that is disintegrating before your eyes – the world. “Loving the world, so madly / Well I know now that nothing’s gonna last,” Steiner projects with the heartbroken courage of Emma Thompson in Love Actually after she wipes away tears and gets the kids to the nativity play. The unexpected chord change that tees up the chorus is stunning; the turnaround is only a few seconds long but you feel it in your guts every time. (Again, only if you’re made of stuffing and not stone / are picking up what Pooh puts down.)

“It’s always exciting to have a little transitional moment like that,” Steiner says of the pre-chorus turnaround in “The World, So Madly”. “I’m always excited when that happens. I literally have a playlist going called ‘rock solid pre-chorus’. I’m trying my best to inventory every time I hear a good one so I can go back and figure out the way [they work].” She cites the 1998 bop “C’est La Vie” by Irish group B*Witched as the one that began this quest (“that song fucking whips”).

Like our conversation, Singin’ to an Empty Chair rocks from levity and back, never dignifying the void by screaming into it. “Burn It Down” – the album’s penultimate track – is their one rage-room moment, the closest they get to letting the darkness pull them down. Like the moodier sibling of “Black Earth, WI” from The Window, it unravels over eight-some minutes, but bends towards fire and brimstone rather than a tiny forested village. Sagan’s finger-blistering solo seethes irregularly like lightning attacking electricity pylons, and the incanted refrain reads like one of Margaret Atwood’s – “We gotta burn it down / Hands off our fucking mouths.”

Drummer Marcus Nuccio, whose face rests in a reassuring smile that’s quick to encourage my half-formed ideas, explains that “Burn It Down” considers the controlled burn concept as a route to a fairer world. “I was thinking about how when you do a controlled burn – or even when there’s a natural burn in a forest – it actually helps growth,” Nuccio tells me, implying that a little destruction and darkness is necessary because “it clears the way for new life.” Overall, he continues, “that’s just an awesome metaphor to have in mind: sometimes you need to burn things down or clear out the brush in order to start something new.”

“That’s amazing! I’ve never heard you say that. That’s really cool,” Steiner exclaims. She goes on to ponder the fallout of “Burn It Down” – the idea that you could be left with something almost utopian. “That’s how Winnie the Pooh feels to me, man – it’s just you and your friends in this world you’ve created,” she shakes her head wistfully, “and everyone has space to be themselves. It’s how I wish life was all the time.”

Though Ratboys don’t try to block out reality, they have created something of a utopia – Hundred Acre Wood-style – within their four-piece unit, which has always prioritised friendship and democratic decision-making, and at times sounds too uplifting to be true. A more cynical band might have been content to leave its audience with the unresolved ire of “Burn It Down”, wouldn’t have pushed itself to find that merciful clearing of hope that is “At Peace in the 100 Acre Wood”. But Ratboys understand you can’t get to B until you go through A. You can’t have one without the other. Like a wise bear once said, “You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.”

“If we’d ended the record with ‘Burn It Down’, it wouldn’t have been the wrong choice – just a different place to leave the audience,” Steiner suggests, a decision assisted by another literary work she kept close during the album’s production: the 2014 novel All My Puny Sorrows by Canadian author Miriam Toews. “One of the characters in the book is a musician, and she talks about album sequencing in a way I wasn’t expecting,” Steiner goes on. “She basically says – not even about sequencing specifically, but about performance – that when you finish, you can leave your audience with this raw, honest truth, an unvarnished perspective of the world. Or you can lead them back to a place of comfort, extend a hand, and offer some kind of respite.”

This is where Ratboys have always succeeded: not in varnishing the world, but in extending a hand to nudge us towards the parts of it that matter.

Just look at their most beloved songs: on “Go Outside” from 2021’s Happy Birthday, Ratboy, they serenely longed to lay down in the sand and listen to the birds. “I Want You (Fall 2010)”, an ode to the friendship at the band’s core, invited us into their loving orbit, made us feel like we were there in the van with them, tickling the air to Maps & Atlases’ guitars as a nice breeze whistled through the open window. On the title track of The Window, they let us hear the final words Steiner’s grandfather said to her grandmother, verbatim, before she passed away, but they packaged such a heavy and intimate scene in a way that was genuine, affecting, and surprisingly inviting. Ratboys are all open windows; never closed doors.

That last example, in particular, shows how much Ratboys trust us – enough to share those private, painful lows as much as the euphoric highs, knowing that we’re here for both. You feel that extended hand, that trust, at the opposite end of the album, too. “Open Up” is aptly titled not because it’s the opener, but because it’s what Steiner, Nuccio, Sagan, and Neumann will do over the next 45 minutes, something they hope works both ways.

“We talked about trust so much, because  any record you press play on for the first time, you have to earn the listener’s trust,” Nuccio tells me when we discuss that opening song, what a hospitable greeting it is. “It’s awesome that it came through, because trust is so important between a record and a listener, especially when it’s a band’s fourth, fifth, sixth record – it can sometimes be hard to establish that trust right away.” With bright, blossoming acoustic strums and folktronic burbles, “Open Up” makes it sound easy.

But Nuccio’s right: it’s rare for an album to give you that oh-we-are-soooo-back feeling within the first ten seconds, guaranteeing that you’re seatbelted in for wherever this is going. And that’s no accident: “I have this weird purist attitude that track one should never be a single,” Steiner says, which shouldn’t be a hot take but is these days given how typical it is to hear at least half an album prior to New Music Friday. “I love pressing play on an album and not knowing how it’s going to start,” she says. Ratboys’ deliberate orchestration of this surprise element is special – it resurrects that fuzzy vignette from childhood where you’re towered over by your dad’s hi-fi system, cheeks clamped by baseball mit-sized headphones, 100% ignorant of the sounds that are about to change everything.

Helping Ratboys to imprint these sortsa feelings on tape was producer and Death Cab for Cutie cofounder Chris Walla, renowned for his emotion-centred approach to producing the likes of Tegan & Sara as well as The Window. “That’s a big thing Chris Walla talks about: track one, how do we establish that copacetic relationship with the listener?” Steiner says. “He knows how to press all the buttons and do these really cool technical tricks, but he’s also so in tune with songs as living things – with the conversation of lyrics, and what we’re offering to the human beings listening to our music.”

After Walla flew in from Norway with two checked suitcases crammed with gear, they all bunkered in Driftless Cabin, in rural Wisconsin, recording the bulk of four songs before heading to Electrical Audio. “Just Want You to Know the Truth” came out of this getaway. “It’s the centrepiece,” Sagan says. “You’re always a little nervous to present the entire centrepiece, but when you do, it ties everything together.” More than anything, it’s Steiner’s lyrics that make this such an important track, as she sings to the empty chair of the album title, each line charging the last with more context and profundity; it’s like a picture that slowly makes sense with each puzzle piece – far easier to undo than to build.

The song was inspired by a therapy technique where you excavate trauma by monologuing to an empty chair. As far as your feelings are concerned, the cause of that trauma is forced to hear you out, unable to refute anything or slam the door in your face. “Traditionally, you’d do it with your therapist there, but I did it on my own,” Steiner shares. “I recorded myself, then went back and listened to it, and it was such a helpful, clarifying experience – not just to process things, but to organise my feelings, to hear myself. It was radical.”

Once she’d spoken to the chair, she could sing to it – hence Singin’ to an Empty Chair – the exercise unlocking a song that’d been hovering just out of reach. But Steiner was careful not to make this a one-sided trauma dump, constructing a scene of substance while kicking a few jigsaw pieces under the couch so that the listener can hear their own irresolutions and redacted truths in her words.

“The guys rallied around, and we built something special,” she says, going Dutch with the praise. While the sprawling composition went through different iterations, they “added little things we hadn’t even planned, like Dave’s guitar solo – his crazy freak-out at the end. That was on the last day of recording,” Steiner continues. It’s her favourite part of the song, and I’m not surprised – because Ratboys are the kind of easygoing that lets candid, last-minute magic flourish, and also because they are always gassing up one another like this, encouraging ideas that might have otherwise waited indefinitely in the not-so-sure wings of the brain.

Steiner goes on, shouting out the band’s bassist Sean Neumann – he isn’t on the call – for doing her “Mike Dirnt fantasy on this record. He’s playing bass with so much confidence, and he’s singing like 90% of the harmonies,” she says, noting that American Idiot was a not-so-obvious touchpoint for the album – “the way those choruses hit, it just sounds massive. I don’t know if it comes through directly, but it was spiritually in the room with us.” Nuccio, for his part, tells me that his favourite thing about being in Ratboys – other than the awesome jays that Sagan rolls at just the right moment – is “fucking rocking with my friends.”

“I think when we get together and play music, it’s an incredible way to bond,” Steiner says. “I don’t know if I’m always conscious of it as it’s happening, but it’s a way to reset our emotions and express them in a way that feels productive.”

Returning to the idea of processing our horror at illegal deportations and democracy’s free-falling etc., she says, “even though we’re not directly speaking about these things, it still feels like a contribution. It’s hard to explain, but I’m really grateful when we have that space. And when we get to do that in a room full of people, it’s even more powerful, because it’s something we’re all sharing together.” Also because, to paraphrase what Pooh said at the start of this article, the things that seem very thingish inside you are quite different when they get out into the open and have other people listening to them.

It’s natural to trip in line with the sardonic cynicism of the content mill – “when someone asked if I was excited for Fall, it took me a minute to realise they meant orange leaves and not societal collapse” etc. etc. – but Ratboys have a knack for angling your cheek towards warmer, still reality-grounded perspectives that remain valid despite everything. Or, rather, they’re valid because of everything. Ratboys not only remind you of all the things you care about; they make your love for those things feel robust again and yet radical or defiant at the same time – whether that’s friendship, trees, birds trading verses, empathetic bears, DIY punk, democratic socialism, or the indelible jangle of a Danelectro guitar cranked toward the heavens.

“Anyone who says guitar music is dying, I challenge them to stand in front of an amp, turn it the fuck up, and play an E chord,” Steiner smiles. “Tell me that’s going to die. I just don’t think that’s possible. It feels so good to play music with people I care about, who love doing it too. I hope we get to do it forever.”

The closing lines of The House at Pooh Corner read, “So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing.” How lucky we are to have something to hitch our hope to – a little band called Ratboys that will always be playing. As long as they do, we’ll keep listening.