Ratboys remains content to take its time

It can take significant time for songs to gestate in Julia Steiner of Ratboys, who compared the process with planting a seed and then spending months or even years tending to the growing sapling before it can be properly harvested. 

“And every so often I run into this issue where it feels like maybe I’ve waited too long, and the moment has passed,” said Steiner, who will join her bandmates in concert at Rumba Cafe on Thursday, June 26, supported by opener Superviolet. “But more often than not, the benefit of time becomes apparent, where things get better, become clearer the longer I let them sit.”

As a result, a handful of the songs Steiner said will appear on the band’s next album, which the Chicago quartet recorded in Seattle alongside producer Chris Walla with an eye on an early 2026 release, actually predate breakout LP The Window, from 2023. On occasion, this out-of-time approach can be disorienting, with Steiner recalling how she held to the idea of writing a song called “The Window” for years before the idea finally calcified, coming together in a phone call with her mother, who relayed the experience of watching Steiner’s grandfather say final goodbyes to his wife, Steiner’s grandmother, through a hospital window “during that crazy, cursed summer of 2020,” as the musician explained it.

“And a lot of the lyrics are things my grandpa actually said in that moment,” Steiner continued. “So, I feel like I was more just the messenger of that story. And I’m so grateful, because my grandpa, he passed away a few months ago, but he was such a loving, direct, honest, emotional guy. And he wore his heart on his sleeve in such a beautiful way. And my goal for that song was to really inhabit his voice and pay tribute to the way he communicated.”

Other songs on The Window bear the impact of the Covid pandemic in less explicit ways, with Steiner allowing that much of album’s musical direction took shape amid lockdown, a stretch in which the bandmates were afforded both the time and space to experiment. This idea best evidences itself in the song “Black Earth, WI,” a rambling, eight-plus-minute epic that doubles as a sonic representation of the freedom experienced by Ratboys in those indeterminate months.

“I think the whole reason we even felt comfortable trying that song is because we had that time to mess around with it, without any sort of pressure outside of the pressure we put on ourselves,” Steiner said. “Looking back now, it was a very pivotal time for our band, because like so many others, we were supposed to go out on a big tour that spring. And [when the pandemic hit] we really had to change course and reassess whether or not we were still going to spend all of this time together making music. And I’m happy to say, me and my bandmates were on the same page, and we wanted to keep getting together. … And 2020, that year was the first year that we ever wrote songs and worked out arrangements together. And it really helped us become a solid, four-person rock band unit.”

Steiner said the new Ratboys songs – a handful of which should turn up in concert at Rumba Cafe – strike a different tone than those on The Window. This is true both literally (the guitarist returned to using a capo after swearing off the device in the making of the band’s last record) and metaphorically, with Steiner acknowledging that she leaned even further into a radical vulnerability that she has increasingly embraced as a hallmark of her writing style.

“I’ve realized I admire and identify with writers who are really focused on unpacking their own existence, like better understanding their family and community and putting their life in context with the world around them,” said Steiner, who also expressed an interest in countering the intimacy of these moments with vocal takes that can stand up to the band’s growing volume. “It’s seeing how I can make my voice fit with the louder, heavier sonics, and how I can push my singing voice to match the energy of an electric guitar.”

And really, everything around Ratboys is bigger these days – a reality Steiner considered recently as she reflected on the 10-year anniversary of the band’s debut album, AOID, which released in June 2015.

“At the time, we were truly releasing music to share with our friends and express ourselves. We weren’t in any sort of careerist mindset, and there wasn’t any sort of goal. It was all for the love of the game,” she said, and laughed. “And not that it’s much different now, but we definitely have a more defined audience. And it’s exciting to know that when we put out a record, people will hear it, and people will want to hear it, which is cool. But back then, yeah, it was truly just for our own entertainment.”