Chicago’s beloved Ratboys announce their fourth studio album, The Window, out August 25 via Topshelf Records with lead single/video ‘It’s Alive!’ and a North American tour.
After more than ten years and four studio albums, The Window finally captures Ratboys as they were always meant to be heard—expansive while still intimate, audacious while still tender—the sound of four friends operating as a single, cohesive unit. The album is sonically diverse, shifting wildly from track to track and flexing everything from fuzzy power pop choruses to warm country twang to mournful folk.
Lyrically, The Window sees Julia Steiner at her most personal, reflecting on love and grief with occasional humor and levity. She frequently leans on windows as a theme—the idea of an interrupted connection, the feeling of being near someone without being fully present—like on the pounding lead single, ‘It’s Alive!’ Opening with Steiner’s honeyed vocals, “Outside my window the birds dance alone // I sit back and take it in // Like some sort of medicine,” it’s a bright and vivacious track that, in Steiner’s words, captures “the overarching feeling of the world spinning on beneath you while you’re stuck in one place.” In the video, directed by John TerEick, Ratboys play in an empty house, as its owners slowly start to move in.
The Window:
- Making Noise for the Ones You Love
- Morning Zoo
- Crossed that Line
- It’s Alive!
- No Way
- The Window
- Empty
- Break
- Black Earth, WI
- I Want You (Fall 2010)
