Burn It Down
On Singin’ to an Empty Chair by Ratboys
We've got Christopher Harris back today writing about the new Ratboys album. We all love Ratboys baby. All my friends love The Nice Ratboys. Their gorgeous and heartbreaking song The Window was number two on my favorites songs of 2023 in fact. If you'd rather read about my favorites of 2025 you can do so here.
Harris recently went wild for the Geese album for Hell World and was lukewarm about One Battle After Another.
He also recently spoke with Julia Steiner and Dave Sagan from the band on a bonus episode of his football podcast, which you can find here. They talked about the new album, Chicago sports, and the five fantasy football leagues Julia is in. (Julia is a Steelers fan and Dave is a Bears fan and they both went to Notre Dame but we won't hold that against them. Go Pats babby!)
Ratboys
Burn It Down
by Christopher Harris
I guess you have to start with the one where Julia says fuck.
On Burn It Down, the penultimate song on Ratboys’ new album Singin’ to An Empty Chair (out February 6), Julia Steiner sings about kindling rage and pouring gasoline and lighting fires and while the song is mid-tempo and measured, it builds to a chorus that repeats the lines “we gotta burn it down” and “hands off our fuckin mouths.”
Now, by my count, among the 52 songs on Ratboys’ five prior studio albums, the f-word has been deployed, but only to describe: (a) a dumb guy at a punk show, and (b) gravity. The point being that my dear sweet indie-rock darlings from Chicago by way of South Bend are smart and heartfelt and occasionally slightly naughty, but they are not typically bomb throwers. They’re way likelier to make you rock out or cry than ask you to take up arms against the oppressor.
You know the old saying. When you’ve lost Ratboys….
And of course Burn It Down wasn’t written about what’s going on in Minnesota right now, because how could it be. In fact the song has been around since 2020, when Steiner wrote the lyrics about a different Minneapolis law-enforcement execution, the killing of George Floyd. But as guitarist Dave Sagan said recently, on a podcast interview we did with the band, “We’re gonna be playing that one every night for a while.”
It’s a pissed-off song from a band that’s spent the last decade finding ways to make you feel good, albeit sometimes by making you feel awful. The Ratboys catalog is so damn great: it’s got alt-inflected rockers and fun-as-hell country numbers and high-concept silliness. If you’ve ever had to put down a pet and then heard Elvis Is In The Freezer, listen, it cooks, it’s a great tune, but dude it also hurts because I really would like to have my dogs back. If you lost a relative during Covid and happened upon The Window, knowing the story of Steiner’s grandfather having to say goodbye to her grandmother through a literal window, it’s just a crusher, but it’s the kind of crusher that makes you feel alive.
To me that’s one magic thing about Ratboys: it’s such fun music, but I could probably name a half-dozen of their songs that take me to the verge of tears. There’s enough damn shit to cry about in the world right now but here I am, still playing The Window like every other day. And somehow it helps. That’s magic.
Okay, so then there’s this new album coming out right now, just as the national nervous breakdown feels somehow worse than ever before. And here’s the part of the review where the writer wonders about the propriety of getting excited about a favorite band’s new songs when a moron god-king’s whims can turn any of us to red mist at a moment’s notice. And then the writer remembers that art is part of what makes life worth living—at least until it’s replaced by ChatGPT—so actually it’s quite healthy and even sort of brave to be stoked about a new album. Right? I mean, maybe not blow-a-whistle-in-a-paramilitary-thug’s-face brave. But pretty brave?
I don’t know. Like, how do you personally listen to music right now? I’m actually asking. How do you, the reader, physically consume songs in February of 2026? Maybe through buds while trying hard not to flip over to social media and learn another object lesson in Trump-related depravity? Maybe on a run designed to Heimlich some serotonin up into your brain so you can stave off depression for another day? Maybe driving your kids someplace whose parking lot you pray won’t be occupied by black Ford Expeditions with out-of-state plates?
The goal of fascism is to squeeze away joy and I guess the best revenge is striking some theoretical balance between beauty and blind rage and so we need all the music and TV shows and movies we can get, and they obviously don’t all have to take direct aim at the maniacs. In the middle of writing this article I myself put on Bluetooth cans and ventured out into the L.A. sunshine and dodged the goddamn Waymo cars that congregate downtown these days like something deep in their code has told them they’d better stick together too, and I shuffled through about 90 minutes of Ratboys new and old and felt pretty good—along Broadway where down an unnamed alley there’s a monument to Biddy Mason, past City Hall where they just had a die-in to protest traffic-related deaths, up to the part of Chinatown where last week I watched an anti-ICE rally—and then I felt bad because I’d spent the last 90 minutes feeling good.
Most of Singin’ to An Empty Chair isn’t angry at all. Anywhere is one of the singles, a power-pop gem written, Steiner told me, partly from the perspective of a family dog whose world falls apart when you leave the room. The other single, Light Night Mountains All That, is punk rock (because guitarist Sagan sure can play the hell out of punk rock) and then has a three-minute feedback-filled freakout. But it’s also careful to begin and end with sweet pastoral acoustic guitar. Two mid-album tracks—Strange Love and especially Penny In The Lake—are straight country. The latter leans into an idealized day we all wish we could live right now, simple and sweet, where the big event is “berries dropping from the sky” which means “guess it’s time to bake a pie.”
It’s stupid to contend who “is” and “isn’t” political because just continuing to get up every day and be kind to people and reckon with the shit the dickheads pile up everywhere is political, and plus Ratboys have an unvarnished history of being on what you and I would consider to be the Right Side, down to campaigning for Bernie and making a Sesame Street cover for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. But the pleasure I’m currently getting out of the new album’s first nine songs is best characterized as remembering what life is like when assholes aren’t ruining everything.
Which brings us back to track 10, Burn It Down, a.k.a. the angry one. It’s a protest song. It’s not that loud and its lyrics aren’t screamed, but it’s a protest song nonetheless.
It’s always been this way
It’s never gonna change
So, take your kindling rage
And throw it on the flame
We gotta burn it down
We gotta burn it down
Hands off our fuckin mouths
We gotta burn it down
But you know what? When we asked the band about the rage behind this song, Steiner said “That feels to us like the emotional climax of the album…and Marcus, our drummer, had this really wonderful analogy of thinking of Burn It Down as almost a controlled burn, where it’s actually healthier for the ecosystem…to have a reset sometimes. And the way we think of that for this song is it maybe can be a reset of the way we treat each other as people.”
Now I’ll admit that when I listen to Burn It Down, "controlled burn" is not what’s on my mind. I’m fantasizing about comeuppance for the racist moron pigs currently dominating most corners of American life. I’m thinking Trump and Noem and Musk and Thiel and... you know the rest of the list. Ratboys, on the other hand, end their new album with At Peace In Hundred Acre Wood, evoking Winnie-The-Pooh and telling us “it’s a brand new day.”
They are—at their angriest—still thinking about what comes next.
Chris Harris has an MFA from UMass and is the author of four novels. He also spent eight years at ESPN, and currently covers the NFL at HarrisFootball.com. Find him on Bluesky @harrisfootball.com.
Read more from him in Hell World:
Luke O’Neil
Luke O’Neil
Here's what I wrote about Ratboys a couple years ago if you were too lazy to click the link up top.
“I walked across the green grass to where I knew you laid. The way the sun was shining down, I only saw your shape. But, I need to tell you everything before it's too late. That I don't regret a single day. And you're so beautiful.”
I do not want to disrespect this song by printing too many of my clumsy words next to it. This is a Tom Petty hit. It’s a Menzingers singalong. It’s a The Sundays classic.
As good as those I mean.
“I wrote this song a few days after the death of my grandma in June 2020,” Julia Steiner said. “She didn’t have Covid, but because of the pandemic my grandpa wasn’t able to visit her in person at the nursing home to say goodbye. He ended up standing outside her room and saying goodbye through an open window. A lot of the lyrics are direct quotes of things he said to her in those final moments.”
It’s so heartfelt in its yearning for a lost loved one that the identical rhyme scheme – which I normally wouldn’t like in a less viscerally felt context – isn’t just acceptable it’s downright magnificent. A revelation.
The window. The window. The window.
Regarding Geese, who were just on SNL the other night, I am still not fully on board but I am getting there.
Man this fucking ruled. I loved it.
More recently in Hell World:
Luke O’Neil
Luke O’Neil
Luke O’Neil