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.
“Know You Then,” one of the record’s chunkiest rock songs, turns a simple refrain—“I didn’t know you then”—into a moral koan, the band tightening the screws underneath her until the chorus is equal parts apology and self-defense. The guitars start clean and taut, then bleed into each other, as if the line between empathy and resentment, guilt and frustration, is smearing in real time. And standout track “Light Night Mountains All That” pushes even further into that queasy space where care curdles into anger. It’s the album’s big “wormhole jam,” sure, but what it really captures is the specific, stomach-churning agitation of loving someone who refuses to meet you halfway. It’s easy to make anger visceral in a song, but frustration is somehow much more specific—and this song hits that nail on the head so hard it hurts. Steiner keeps tossing out “you didn’t care” like she’s trying on different ways of saying the same accusation—half-sung, half-spoken, finally screamed—while Sagan’s guitar and Nuccio’s drums claw their way toward a peak that never quite resolves. Just when you expect a clean button, they circle the feeling one more time, add another bar of soloing, let the drums drag you through one last, slightly different repetition. You’re not granted the satisfaction of revelation at the downbeat of a final chorus; all you can do is sit in the noise until it fades away.
If all this sounds heavy, that’s because a lot of it is—but that doesn’t mean it’s joyless. One of the smarter choices the band makes is treating panic and neurosis as textures to write through, not just topics to gesture at. “Anywhere,” allegedly about Sagan’s family dog losing his mind whenever his mom leaves the room, is basically an anxious-attachment case study disguised as a sugar rush: “Oh I know it’s bad, but I can’t help my panic attack,” Steiner sings cheerily over jangly indie-pop, handclaps, and chiming guitars. “Penny in the Lake” lets some of that air back in without pretending the tension’s gone. The stakes are small, mundane, but the looseness feels pointed after so much emotional gridlock. And there’s “Strange Love,” a two‑minute flutter about an oddball romance that feels almost suspicious in its ease, Steiner chasing away “all the negative thoughts” over a soft, folky ballad. All of it points toward the world of “At Peace in the Hundred Acre Wood,” the disarmingly gentle closer that finally lets her imagine a life organized around the people who actually show up: crying in the rain, laughing through the pain, promising to be there when someone else can’t quite find the words. Taken together, these songs don’t contradict the rest of the album so much as suggest an alternate future for it, one where all that anxious energy finally has somewhere gentler to go.
While Ratboys have truly never put out a bad album, 2023’s The Window felt like their big leap—the moment the quartet proved they could pull off fuzzed‑out rock songs, tender folk, and long, indulgent jams without losing the thread. In that sense, Singin’ to an Empty Chair feels less like a reinvention and more like a refinement. You still get the whole Ratboys grab bag—sparkling, almost straight-up alt-country on “Penny in the Lake” and “Strange Love”; nervy indie‑rock on “Anywhere” and “What’s Right?”; sprawling storms like “Burn It Down”—but it all feels of a piece in a way it didn’t always before. “Open Up” can sit next to “Know You Then,” a twangy opener next to a chugging alt‑rock single, without any sense of gear‑shifting whiplash. Every extra bar of jamming, every feedback squall, feels in service to the same question Steiner keeps asking: What happens if I open up this time?
That’s the quiet breakthrough here—the work, as Steiner writes it, isn’t about floating above anger or grief but learning how to live inside it. You can hear that tension in the way her voice stays measured even when the guitars go scorched‑earth, or in how a lyric often holds two contradictory truths at once: I didn’t know you then and I would’ve helped if I could; I can’t live without saying anything, but saying something might ruin everything. Singin’ to an Empty Chair lives inside that contradiction, refusing to choose between compassion and self‑preservation, between reaching out and walking away. [New West Records]
Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
