If something feels familiar about the latest from Chicago indie darlings Ratboys, that’s partly by design. Since its release in August, The Window — the breakout new LP from the rising band fronted by singer-songwriter Julia Steiner — has thumped the 10-year-old outfit into a new critical orbit with its lived-in blend of emo, power-pop and country-rock holding fresh ideas and time-tested comforts under each arm.
“When you meet someone who’s open-hearted and easy to talk to, it’s like you’ve known them for a long time. I’ve felt that way about certain albums … you listen to it, and it just feels like an old friend somehow,” Steiner told Boulder Weekly shortly after the group’s latest came into the world via SoCal standard bearer Topshelf Records. “It’s nice to think our music might have that sort of relationship with anyone.”
Despite greeting listeners with the warm welcome of a trusted trailhead, The Window is at the height of its powers when it goes off the map. Take the effervescent side-one standout “Morning Zoo,” a rootsy jangle-pop earworm that would have likely been scaled back on past efforts, which becomes denser and more delicious with blooming fiddle saws and honky-tonk piano that color the edges of the frame in exciting new hues.
“We just had so much time to really let the songs cook — and even with the details after the studio session, like the packaging and thinking about how we wanted to roll it out. We could just be a little bit more intentional,” says the 31-year-old vocalist and guitarist originally from Louisville, Kentucky. “So this record definitely feels like the most complete artistic statement we’ve made so far, the most realized. It’s like a new chapter for us.”
Strength in numbers
But there’s more behind Ratboys’ headstrong leap into new sonic territory than the luxury of time. It’s also their first album to be written and recorded as a quartet, adding drummer Marcus Nuccio and bass player Sean Neumann to double the band’s size from its previous duo of co-founders Steiner and Dave Sagan. More cooks in the kitchen put gas to the flame on cuts like “Black Earth, WI,” a reflective rock number that explodes into a sprawling, arena-ready guitar jam of epic proportions.
“I had been working on that tune for a couple years by myself, and it kind of stalled out after a certain point. I just felt like I couldn’t really get much more out of it on my own,” Steiner says of the song featured in the latest installment of the Rock Band video game series. “When we played as a group, the potential for it to be a longer, more meandering jam became possible. That wasn’t really a thing when I was playing it alone.”
To give this new group effort its richest studio expression, the band enlisted superstar producer and former Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Chris Walla. Steiner says working with the DIY veteran helped the band unlock new sonic ideas through a heady mix of curiosity and adventurousness that brought the album’s 12 songs into sharp new relief.
“I think he saw that we were willing to go there with him,” she says of the 24-day stint with Walla at the Hall of Justice studio in his native Seattle. “He’s also just a complete wizard in the studio who knows how to work all these old-school tape machines and outboard equipment like the back of his hand. He was an awesome mix of a music philosopher who we admire, but also someone who knows how to execute the ideas he’s dreaming up.”
‘Making noise for the ones you love’
While lineup changes and studio time may have given the music new wings, the beating heart of The Window lies in Steiner’s subtle but searing lyricism. If there’s a through line connecting the songwriter’s deceptively breezy turns of phrase, it’s a gnawing sense of the passage of time — looking back as your life changes, and considering it as a whole. That much is clear off the jump with a simple bar from the album opener, “Making Noise for the Ones You Love”: I get sad / when I look back / at all the time / I thought we had.
“It’s kind of the thesis statement for that whole idea: taking stock of these important relationships and kind of zooming out and witnessing them in totality,” she says. “The goal was to write lyrics that were actually quite open-ended, so anyone can sort of go on that journey or view their lives through that lens.”
But on the album’s tearjerker title track, Steiner tests the limits of her open-ended lyrics with perhaps the most personal and bruising song of her career. Unspooling a memory of sharing final moments with her dying grandmother through an open window at the height of lockdown-era restrictions, she sings from the perspective of her surviving grandfather as he looks back on the life and love they shared: Sue, you’ll always be my girl.
“Even though it does deal with grief, loss and saying goodbye, it genuinely feels less like an absence and more like a presence of her on stage with me,” Steiner says. “When we play the song, I feel very close to her memory. It’s just so amazing and powerful how music can do that — kind of bring someone back, briefly.”
ON THE BILL: Ratboys with Another Michael. 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 21, Globe Hall, 4483 Logan St., Denver. Tickets here.
