On the Rise
The Rat Utopia Experiment

“We want you to feel like you’re at the circus when you’re watching us. We want that feeling of awe.” Everything culminates in an electric show of polished madness. Fronting the band, Lane’s animated, melodic voice cuts through the band’s propulsive fuzz rock as she effortlessly shifts to hardcore screams in the time it takes to snap a finger. 

She and her comrades – lead guitarist Maddox Mullins, bassist Francis Green, rhythm guitarist Hendrix McGinty, and drummer Christian Montemayor – each have their faces clad in vivid clown colours and freakish grins to add fuel to the blazing theatrics, as does Lane’s candid storytelling that aims to combat social injustice. Sometimes no barrier exists between the audience and band – it is literally broken when attendees jump on stage to dance to the controlled chaos. With all these ingredients, The Rat Utopia Experiment embody punk culture to a T.

Harnessing the fierce energy of riotous punk rock with such expressiveness, it’s not a surprise the band has moved the hearts of the underground – and Mom + Pop too, becoming a recent label signee soon embarking on their first-ever national tour, where they’ll play headline shows and open for The Linda Lindas. Like that Los Angeles punk quartet, The Rat Utopia Experiment formed in high school, and after graduating, they can finally exit their home turf in Washington to make waves across the States. Their passion has been kicking and screaming to be let out.

Unsurprisingly, their formation was unconventional. Music was always in Lane’s home because it was her dad’s whole life. He’d done the rounds during the ’80s, touring in bands within Tacoma’s punk scene. He mentored for Tacoma’s Live It OutLoud program, which places aspiring musicians aged 12 and 18 in a new band supervised by a mentor. Lane was, naturally, mainly busy being a kid. “I had been around a couple of rehearsals with the kids my dad was mentoring, but I just never cared,” she admits. “I was playing Minecraft at the back of the room when I was 11 years old.”

Her vocal teacher at the time, also a mentor, urged Lane to try the programme. In her first year, she played with alt-punk band Hot Stepmom and enjoyed the experience, but didn’t really care again afterwards. Yet once she took the rock rite of passage of discovering Nirvana and had the opportunity to front her own band, Lane had realised she was planting the seeds for living a musical life. “My dad kept telling me, ‘You’re such a good songwriter, you should keep doing this,’” Lane recalls. “Suddenly I was like, ‘Damn, this is my passion.’ It became really clear to me.”

Since forming in 2022, members have come and gone, but today’s iteration of The Rat Utopia Experiment has settled. Lane and Mullins are the self-described “OG members”; Green has been involved for over a year; and McGinty and Montemayor joined earlier this year. If you want any idea of how committed they are to this cause, Montemayor arrived as their saviour: In March, three days before the band’s appearance at Treefort Music Fest in Boise, their fill-in drummer dropped out. And Boise is an eight-hour road trip from Tacoma. A drum teacher Lane’s dad knew connected them with Montemayor, who came along and learnt their set anyway. “There was no reason for us to meet him otherwise, but he was just available and ready to do it,” Lane says. “It’s so crazy, and it turned out he was a great guy. We were like, ‘Shit, you should stay in the band.’”

You could point to all kinds of emo, grunge, and nu-metal music the band feed on to drive their intense performances, but what about their punk ethos? Lane asserts they weren’t actually a punk band at all for a while: “I was telling stories, but they weren’t political in nature. I was between 12 and 14 when I was writing these first songs.” They’d covered the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” once, but even Lane knows that’s a cop-out reason. It was her radicalisation after entering Tacoma’s punk scene, and watching the modern adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front and reading the book, now her all-time favourite, that steered the music and her songwriting to political waters.

“That led me to write one of our songs, ‘Counter Fracture’. It was the stepping stone to political messaging because the message in that song is really explicit about young kids being fucking sent to war,” Lane explains. “It’s the song, the point of view, the kid is dying, and the cover – everything.” At her young age, she reveals her wisdom by fearlessly confronting topics head-on. On “Counter Fracture”, she voices: “The counteractions in my mind / Leave me with a shattered spine / Even though I’ve been sure that / I’ll count my days.” That forthright sensibility has seeped into the band’s recent songs, like the call-and-response “Blast!” lambasting the Trump administration, and their breakthrough single “Lobotomize Me”, a gruesome narration of the lack of autonomy given to women in the music industry. Even on their website, they share the context of Lane’s stories. “I don’t care about shying away from the story I’m telling ’cause people can have their own interpretation of the song either way. Even if I tell you exactly what I’m writing about, people are going to take what they take. So, who cares?”

Playing those stories for their community has opened the opportunity to stand up for what is right. Lane recalls that her nail-in-the-coffin moment to turn so politically motivated was last year, when a borderline Christian nationalist group rallied at Cal Anderson Park, a historically queer park, to spout anti-trans rhetoric. “I was like, ‘This is my chance to do something. I’ve been in this space. I’ve started talking about politics. This is my chance to get involved.’” The band organised a successful counter-protest, playing music all day long, completely outlasting the hate rally. They’ve never looked back since, recognising their power to protest peacefully and spread love. “We want to connect with people and inspire them to go out and make change as well.”

It’s come up repeatedly, but Lane’s propensity for storytelling gives The Rat Utopia Experiment the wow factor that pulls people in. “Growing up, I didn’t care about music writing, but I really liked writing stories from a young age, like long stories,” Lane remembers. “I loved it. I mean, it makes sense looking back now that I ended up loving songwriting, ’cause all my songs are stories somehow. I love imagery and metaphors.”

Lane hopes the band’s audience can experience that narrative immersion. “I think a collective thing – I’m going to speak for everybody here, they might kill me later – is that we want to tell stories,” she confirms. “Whether the stories are political or not, we just want to give people the sense of connection and something they can relate to, and that’s also going to make them think about something maybe they didn’t realise before.” As they prepare their debut album with sharper songwriting, their unreleased songs are set to venture into more complicated, darker, and weirder territory. “We want people taking those emotions, and whatever else from those songs, and being able to use that platform to make change and inspire people.”

One case in point was when Lane met an avid fan from Boise, barely younger than her, after their striking show at Treefort Music Fest. “She was like, ‘Your band is my favourite band ever. I’ve cried listening to your music. I literally love your music so much. I discovered it when I was in a really bad place, and it’s helped me so much.’ I’ve never heard anybody say anything like that, and it was kind of shocking, you know?” Being starstruck can’t be faked, so receiving awe-inspiring responses like that, for Lane and her crew as they finally get off the ground, means they have to keep going. By providing a sense of purpose, they’re doing something right.

Lane adds, “What an honour that my writing, the lyrics I’ve written, were able to help somebody like that and connect with her. Now I’m actually doing something – I’m not just fucking around writing music and playing songs on stage – it’s really building an audience and connecting with people.” If continuing means creating more positive social change for her own and her peers’ future, they’re not going to slow down; this experiment has only just begun.