In Singin’ to an Empty Chair, Ratboys find more revelation than reinvention
Paste Pick: The Chicago band turns therapy’s in‑between spaces into songs that resist neat resolutions, letting emotional maturity bite down instead of smoothing everything over.
There are not, I don’t think, very many albums about therapy. To be fair, therapy only recently stopped being a cultural shorthand for weakness; its framing as a kind of basic maintenance, like going to the dentist for your brain, is an awfully new one. But there’s also the simple fact that therapy itself is stubbornly uncinematic. A great deal of art still worships at the altar of the emotional extreme: all-consuming rage, obsessive desire, bottomless grief, impossible joy. The myth of the suffering artist endures for a reason—we’re conditioned to believe great songs come from rock-bottom breakdowns, those moments of rupture that see bottles thrown and tears shed. Raw catharsis. There’s art to be made from the aftermath, too; those late-stage revelations that can be strung into song. Closure, in other words. Across Singin’ to an Empty Chair, though, Julia Steiner writes from the unsexy middle of the story, long after the initial catharsis and well before the closure. Ratboys’ sixth album is a rare, bracing look at that no-mans-land—an album that lets emotional maturity be the thing with teeth.
Fittingly, the record takes its name from the “empty chair” therapeutic technique, in which somebody sits across from an imagined loved one—in reality, the chair is, of course, empty—and says all the things that feel impossible to voice in person. These songs are written not just about an unnamed estranged loved one but, crucially, for them. They’re messages in bottles tossed toward a shoreline that might as well be a brick wall (although, notably, Steiner did end up sending a copy of the album to the estranged loved one in question). Communication, then, becomes something like the album’s raison d’etre. In another kind of record, the tension would be whether the message ever gets through; here, the act of saying it aloud is the point, whether or not anyone ever answers.
The band finds ways to make that feel tense, even propulsive, instead of purely inward and soggy. “Open Up” starts like a friendly check-in—Steiner’s voice almost fairy-light over fingerpicked guitar and a steady, polite pulse—then gradually widens into something close to an ultimatum, the drums crashing in like waves while a low hum thickens beneath her: “What’s it gonna take to open up this time?” By the time Dave Sagan’s electric guitar starts echoing the vocal melody back at her, repeating the titular question without words, the song feels less like a nudge toward vulnerability and more like the sound of someone realizing they might never get an answer. Eight-minute centerpiece “Just Want You to Know the Truth” flips that dynamic: instead of pleading for openness, Steiner is the one cracking herself open, cataloging the “skeletons” unearthed after a loved one left home and the way those discoveries rewrote the past in real time. When the arrangement finally erupts—slide guitars curdling into thick distortion, drums pounding like a headache you can’t walk off—it’s not a release, but the second half of the conversation. It’s the music circling the truth words alone can’t quite pin down.
Part of why these songs land is that Ratboys are, by now, absurdly good at staging that emotional push-pull in their arrangements. They’ve always thrived on the contrast between soft, melodic sweetness and hard, crashing racket, but Singin’ to an Empty Chair tightens that duality until it feels like the organizing principle. Bassist Sean Neumann and drummer Marcus Nuccio’s rhythm work keeps the songs breathing: the way “Anywhere” snaps from nervous shuffle to full gallop, or how “What’s Right?” keeps subtly shifting its drum room under the same progression, makes these songs feel alive. Sagan’s show-stealing solos—grainy, slowly unspooling detours or crisp, bright exclamations—act like punctuation marks rather than indulgences, small flashes of volatility that make each eruption feel earned. And even when Steiner is at her most clear-eyed, there’s always a splinter in the line somewhere: “It’s not what you did, it’s what you didn’t do,” she sings on “Truth,” a sentence that sounds decisive until you sit with it long enough to realize how much is still unsaid inside it.
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