RATBOYS - Singin’ To An Empty Chair

The title and cover art of the new Ratboys album point unmistakably to the Gestalt "empty chair technique", one of the most emblematic tools in psychotherapy focused on perception and experience. Born and developed in Germany in the early twentieth century, this technique turns inner dialogue into a concrete experience, useful to the healing process. It's as if Julia Steiner had used these songs to work through those difficult conversations she was never able to have in real life. The album is, in fact, a one-sided dialogue with loved ones from whom she's drifted apart over the course of her life. The "empty chair" symbolizes the space left by those no longer present, and the music becomes the means to fill that void and, at last, say the words she never had the courage to speak aloud.

With that necessary premise out of the way, let's turn to the purely musical side of things, which explores indie-rock, power pop and alt-country territory with real ease. If 2023's "The Window" was the record of arrival, "Singin' To An Empty Chair" is the one of maturity, thanks in part to a greater compositional boldness and freedom. Ratboys deliver a work that Julia Steiner describes as a quilt: a patchwork of pieces recorded between the rural silence of Wisconsin and the energy of Steve Albini's Electrical Audio studios. Throughout, you can hear echoes of Wilco, a band the group clearly admires in the way it layers sound and stretches out the pace of composition.

The opening track, "Open Up", is dominated by clean, reverb-drenched arpeggios that point directly to cosmic country and Seventies folk-rock. It's a song that breathes, in no hurry to reach the chorus, making it immediately clear that this will be a record of experimentation rather than simple pop-rock songs. "Light Night Mountains All That" is a nearly six-minute track that starts with an energetic folk-rock drive before collapsing into a noisy psychedelic jam, driven by Dave Sagan's distortions.

Next comes "Anywhere", a sugary, driving power-pop track that nonetheless conceals an underlying tension. It's the shortest and most "radio-friendly" song on the record, one where you can catch similarities with the sound of Wednesday. It captures the feeling of being lost when the person you love pulls away, even just for a moment.

"Just Want You To Know The Truth" is the album's emotional core, a ballad running over eight minutes that builds with almost touching patience. The pedal steel then adds a layer of country melancholy that erupts into a cathartic finale. Here Steiner directly confronts the album's central theme, a painful family estrangement, doing so by listing fragments of everyday life as evidence of a bond that is slowly falling apart.

"What's Right", with its sweeping, War On Drugs-style momentum, harks back to classic indie-rock. Here the guitar sheds the ethereal reverb of the opener for a more rhythmic, square-edged approach, creating an effective contrast with Julia's voice, which rises with crystalline clarity.

A nod also goes to “Burn It Down,” another of the album's high points: here Ratboys reach an electric intensity and fury that seem to draw directly from the rock mastery of Neil Young and his Crazy Horse. The track opens with a circular, almost hypnotic guitar riff that slowly builds before collapsing into a finale of feedback and distortion. The rhythm section doesn't just hold down the beat but pushes the song toward a slowcore/post-rock aesthetic the band had never explored with such ferocity before.

Now on their sixth album, the American band seem to have reached a level of mastery and confidence that lets them move with total ease between the intimate expanses of country-rock and the sweeping blazes of their most energetic, vibrant rock, turning every scar from the past into pure creative energy.

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21/02/2026