Ratboys Announce New Album, Share Video for New Song “Anywhere”
Singin’ to an Empty Chair Due Out February 6, 2026 via New West
By Mark Redfern
Chicago indie rockers Ratboys have announced a new album, Singin’ to an Empty Chair, and shared a video for a new song from it, “Anywhere.” Singin’ to an Empty Chair is due out February 6, 2026 via New West, their first for the label. Below check out “Anywhere,” followed by the album’s tracklist and cover artwork, as well as their tour dates.
The album includes “Light Night Mountains All That,” a new song the band shared in September that was #1 on our Songs of the Week.
The band features vocalist/guitarist Julia Steiner, guitarist Dave Sagan, drummer Marcus Nuccio, and bassist Sean Neumann. Ratboys’ last album, The Window, was #1 on our Top 100 Albums of 2023 list.
The band wrote and demoed new songs at a cabin on a 75-acre plot of land in Wisconsin’s Driftless Area. Then several months later they returned there to work for one week with co-producer Chris Walla (Death Cab for Cutie, Tegan and Sara). Then with Walla they moved to Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio in Chicago and finally to Rosebud Studio in Evanston, Illinois.
“We wanted to approach this record like it was a quilt,” Neumann says in a press release. “We recorded the songs in all these different places, so we approached it in a way where different songs had different scenes. Certain parts of songs were recorded in different spaces, and we switch back and forth between them throughout the record to help tell the story of each song.”
Steiner began therapy for the first time before they started work on Singin’ to an Empty Chair, which impacted the lyrics on the album, its title referencing “The Empty Chair” technique, a therapy exercise in which someone practices having a difficult conversation with someone who’s not there, speaking to an empty chair.
“A big, overarching theme of this record is my attempt to document my experience being estranged from a close loved one,” she says. “The goal is to update this person on what’s been going on in my life and to try to bridge that impasse and reach out a hand into the void.”
For the new single, “Anywhere,” Steiner was inspired by the family dog belonging to guitarist Dave Sagan. “Whenever Dave’s mom leaves the room, oh man, his whole world just falls apart,” she explains. “You can see it in his face. I think a lot of us can relate to that sort of anxious attachment style.”
Bobby Butterscotch directed the song’s music video, which plays off of these themes.
Summing up the making of Singin’ to an Empty Chair, Steiner says:“The experience of making this record definitely gives me hope for whatever happens next. There are plenty of good days, days filled with friendship and love, and then there are days when I dwell on things and desperately want to bridge the gap. It’s my whole life, you know? So, for me, this record is a document of all of those days stitched together, like a quilt in a time capsule, just waiting to get dug up when the time is right.”
Read our interview with Ratboys on The Window here and read our rave review of the album here.
Also read our 2021 interview with Ratboys.