Each song on Ratboys’s Singin’ to an Empty Chair plays out like a conversation between two people that continues after one of them has left the room. A longing for connection can be felt throughout the album, with unguarded language that moves between tenderness and frustration, framing intimacy as a risk worth taking regardless of the outcome.
On the first track, “Open Up,” singer Julia Steiner asks a loved one, “What’s it gonna take to open up, this time?” She promises not to say, “I told you so,” but to listen, hoping for something like clarity, even if it might not come. Musically, the song builds toward a crescendo that feels almost too big, like a heart trying to keep pace with a truth that’s difficult to hear. That tension, restless and unresolved, becomes the album’s engine, an approach that Ratboys have flirted with before but never calibrated as precisely as they do here.
The gentle drift of “Just Want You to Know the Truth” lays bare this push and pull. The song is built around a melody just robust enough to hold what’s being said, as Steiner recounts memories that are both painfully ordinary and impossible to shake: “It’s not that I don’t miss you or the way it used to be…It’s that I can’t live my life without sayin’ anything.”
Just when things threaten to get too heavy, like on “Penny in the Lake,” a bandmate’s rooster impression introduces a more playful tone. Not long after, Steiner tosses off an aside about what she’s having for breakfast, which is loosely phrased enough to leave it unclear whether “Jesus Christ” is literally on the menu or is simply an exhausted exclamation.
When not trying to hold back a smile, Ratboys lean into restlessness. On “Burn It Down,” Steiner sounds like she’s drowning, accompanied by sunburnt guitar squalls: “Deep down you know it’s wrong…It’s never gonna change.” Rather than tie things up neatly, the band lets these emotions play out, giving them space to burn out across seven minutes.
This willingness to let the songs breathe extends to Singin’ to an Empty Chair’s construction. Ratboys recorded these songs in various locations, and as a result each one feels like its own world. With squealing guitars that wander, tripping on their own feedback, and drums that sputter into oblivion, “Light Night Mountains All That” drifts and circles back, never quite settling. It meanders, loses its way, and only finds clarity by keeping the conversation going.
The album closes with the gentle country sway of “At Peace in the Hundred Acre Wood,” with Steiner promising: “When the world stops/But you’re spinning on your own/It takes a few days just to slow back down.” The chair may be empty, the conversation unfinished, but there’s a steadiness in having said what needed to be said—and in trusting that effort to be enough.
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