In many ways, 2023 was Ratboys’ year. The Chicago band’s fifth LP, The Window, was our Album of the Week (back when we still did that kind of thing) upon its release, and we even named it the 5th-best album of the year come that December. I wrote then, “Much like its title suggests, The Window is a portal into a world Julia Steiner is still considering the weight of. No longer fixated on how the grief of childhood can tumble into adulthood, the work here examines what chapter comes next; the ways that love and what-could’ve-beens can haunt the present,” and I still mean it. On top of that, “Morning Zoo” was our pick for the 3rd-best song of the year. I think about The Window all the time. It’s a fall record to the nines.
Now, Ratboys are back and they were worth the wait, having signed with a new label, New West, and released the 6-minute, Chris Walla-produced track “Light Night Mountains All That.” Steiner says of the single: “My original idea was to write an ultra-high energy folk song, in the style of the Dodos’ Visiter, with somewhat spooky, mysterious, and pastoral lyrics—like what Chris Otepka of the Heligoats might conjure up on a mushroom trip. This song really took shape during our initial writing session up at the Driftless Cabin in Wisconsin last March; the guys and I nearly went insane fleshing out the arrangement and its odd timings together. I wrote the lyrics during that original demoing trip, centered around the idea of a fantastic, rural vision-quest where the days and nights blend together and nothing is quite as it seems.”
Check out the music video for “Light Night Mountains All That,” directed by the band’s drummer, Marcus Nuccio, below.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.pastemagazine.com ’
