How a Bernie Sanders Shout-Out, The Post-Country Boom & Chris Walla’s Know-How Primed Ratboys for Their Biggest Album Yet
In Billboard’s monthly indie spotlight, the stalwarts discuss their rich history and new album, ‘The Window.’
The Album
The Window, out August 25 on Topshelf
The Origin
For Ratboys’ Julia Steiner and Dave Sagan, college started paying off before taking a single class. “Dave and I met during freshman orientation” at Notre Dame, Steiner tells Billboard. “We were both music nerds in a sea of – in a student body that isn’t full of music nerds. We showed up to college and neither of us had plans to start a band or to seek out people to play music with. We just kind of found each other really quickly.”
Before long, Steiner and Sagan were posting their recordings online and playing regional DIY shows. “The first community that we found ourselves in was in the south suburbs of Chicago, which is where Dave and [bassist] Sean [Neumann] grew up,” Steiner says. “I immediately got welcomed into this community of bands and music freaks down there that loved every type of music and were really passionate about having house shows with a million different types of bands.”
In the mid-’10s, Ratboys went from Chicago upstarts to Windy City rock fixtures, cementing their reputation with Topshelf releases AOID in 2015 and GN in 2017. That year, the quartet solidified its current lineup with the additions of Nuemann and drummer Marcus Nuccio; all four played on Printer’s Devil, Ratboys’ critical breakthrough that arrived just before the pandemic in early 2020.
Years ago, Steiner referred to Ratboys as “post-country” – riffing on an inside joke with Sagan about the vagueness of terms like “post-hardcore” and “post-rock” – and the descriptor has followed the project, thanks to its vivid lyricism and natural fusion of sounds. Sagan’s description today is more direct: “We’re like Tom Petty,” he says. “We’re just a tight rock band.” (Steiner chimes in, “How humble of you, Dave!”)
Tongue-in-cheek or not, Steiner’s description has proven prescient for both Ratboys and their peers. “I think you were kind of ahead of your time there a little, Julia,” Nuccio says. “I mean, look at the landscape of indie-rock right now. So many bands, like Big Thief and Wednesday and Florry and all amazing bands, it kind of is like post-country, right? In the way that post-rock or post-hardcore is taking a genre and then adding a little modern twist to it.”
“Some of the tunes that we make are within – or at least paying homage to – that country tradition,” Steiner concludes.
The Record
While on tour with Foxing in 2018, Ratboys met Chris Walla, who had produced their tourmates’ acclaimed album Nearer My God out of his Seattle recording studio. In 2021, with a stable of new songs penned in quarantine, Ratboys cold-called Walla, best known for his time in Death Cab For Cutie, to helm the boards for what would become The Window.
When a tour later that year took Ratboys through Seattle, the band met with Walla; he asked them about their vision for their next album during on a walk back from a grocery store in the pouring rain. “We immediately dove into the details as if we’d known each other forever,” Steiner says. “He’s just a very easy person to spend time with.”
Soon, the band was sending demos to Walla for creative guidance, and in early 2022, Ratboys returned to Seattle to for a month to record, marking their first sessions outside of Chicago. Neumann says Ratboys cherished the opportunity to immerse and “make a record without thinking about the outside world,” comparing the sessions to staying over at a friend’s house. “There was one couch in there, and everybody had their preferred spot on the couch,” Sagan adds. “By the end of it, everybody had their own, like, perfectly formed butt groove.” (“That was the provisional title of the record, actually,” Steiner quips.)
Walla helped the band record live-to-tape for the first time, and also proved an empathetic sounding board for The Window‘s lyrical content. “I told him, ‘A lot of the songs are more personal, more real, more honest than some of the things we’ve made before – like, I just want it to be very real, unflinchingly so,’” Steiner recalls. “He was game for that. We really looked at everything in the face and [were] full-steam ahead with some of these ideas.”
The Breakthrough
In January 2020, Ratboys received an unlikely boost. Organizers for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign contacted the band to open for one of the senator’s Iowa rallies, and Steiner and Sagan braved a blizzard to play the gig. When Sanders took the stage for his speech, he thanked Ratboys – but Steiner’s phone died as she tried to film the moment for posterity.
“I was like, ‘Well, bummer, I guess I’ll never get to share that with anyone,’” she says. Luckily, a friend captured the moment – and endearing footage of Sanders saying “Let me thank the Ratboys for their music” went viral.
The episode dovetailed with the rollout for Printer’s Devil, Ratboys’ most accomplished set of songs yet, which arrived that February to rave reviews. The pandemic disrupted the band’s planned headline tour, which was to begin March 14, 2020, but Ratboys made lemonade from lemons, diving into livestreaming and writing. To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Ratboys re-recorded several early songs – and a new one, the instant quarantine classic “Go Outside” – for the 2021 full-length Happy Birthday, Ratboy!; the project coincided with Ratboys’ first overtures to Walla.
Two years after Happy Birthday, Ratboys returned with the longest song of its career, the eight-and-half-minute “Black Earth, WI.” The expansive rocker – along with other new singles “It’s Alive!,” “The Window,” “Crossed That Line,” and “Morning Zoo” (out today) – flashed the band’s recent lyrical and musical growth.
The Future
Ratboys co-headlined a tour with Wild Pink in 2021, but the band is excited to finally make good on its nixed 2020 touring plans and head out on a headline run of its own next month. “We’ve never had the opportunity to do a real, ticketed headline tour,” Steiner says with excitement. “It’s finally happening!”
The Piece of Studio Equipment They Cannot Live Without
Steiner: “A roll of gaffe tape. Very useful to have around, not just for cymbal-dampening purposes – which I know nothing about, that’s like black magic to me – but I found a very, very important lesson while vocal tracking on this record: sometimes in order to unlock the best vocal performance, you need some sort of physical object to interact with while you’re singing. At one point, I grabbed this heavy-ass roll of gaffe tape that we had and just the weight of it in my hands, I was able to sing better. That was indispensable to me throughout the session.”
The Artist They Believe Deserves More Attention
Neumann cites Chicago pal Nnamdï, and Nuccio teases “a secret Nnamdï surprise coming in the Ratboys world, for any of the vinyl heads out there” who buy The Window on wax.
The Advice Every Indie Artist Needs to Hear
Sagan: “Play a show before you start thinking about any Spotify listeners. Don’t worry about how people receive your music – just play it first.”
The Thing That Needs to Change in the Music Industry
Steiner: “The music industry today kind of treats music like a public utility, and I really fear that there’s no way to go back from that entirely. The value of a song, the value of an artistic idea has kind of been washed away. If there’s some way that we could reframe the way we look at music… honestly, we’ve talked about this in the band: Spotify should be $100 a month. It’s so cheap. It’s just a matter of finding that tipping point where people will agree that this has value and be willing to pay more for it.”