Photo by Miles Kalchik

It was thought that Ratboys’ 2023 listmaking effort, The Window, had put it all together and made for a career best amid an already-impressive catalog that would be hard to top. But this is Ratboys, a band who just keeps better with time and with its follow-up — and first since leveling up onto a new label home with New West Records — Singin’ to An Empty Chair on the horizon for 2026, maybe that may just become a happy misnomer.

Based on what they’ve already previewed in early singles in the fizzy jams of “Light Night Mountains All That” and the buoyant “Anywhere”, its latest “What’s Right?” hears the Chicago band doing their most to challenge themselves in finding a strange, sweet beauty within the friction of merging their dimensions of indie rock and alt-country with bigger pop melodies stringing them together alongside returning producer Chris Walla.

The four-piece are no strangers to writing a song within a song within a song — or in this case, a dream — and this one plays out seamlessly across three parts. It begins with piquing inspo from the borealis Americana rock of the War On Drugs before cruising into a steady spin of aggressive drum turbulence that kind of recalls Cloud Nothings’ “No Future/No Past”. All the while Julia Steiner paints the scenery cosmically from her subconscious. There’s nobody denying what’s right this time when the view looks like this…

Directed by: Marcus Nuccio

Ratboys’ Singin’ to An Empty Chair will be released February 6th on New West Records.