Ratboys will release their new album Singin’ to an Empty Chair will drop on February 6th via New West Records, along with the news, the band have shared single/video, “Anywhere.” The LP, is the band’s first for New West Records.

To record the album, members Julia Steiner, guitarist Dave Sagan, drummer Marcus Nuccio, and bassist Sean Neumann headed to Wisconsin’s Driftless Area to write and demo new songs. Months later, the group headed to the same cabin to begin tracking with co-producer Chris Walla, the band’s trusted collaborator who also produced The Window. After a one-week cabin session, Ratboys and Walla took the songs to Steve Albini’s famed Electrical Audio studio in Chicago, and later to Rosebud Studio in Evanston, Illinois, to finish recording. “We wanted to approach this record like it was a quilt,” Neumann says. “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.”

“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.” Singin’ to an Empty Chair marks the first Ratboys album written since Steiner began therapy. The title references a therapy exercise called “The Empty Chair” technique, during which a person attempts to have a difficult conversation with someone who’s not physically present, by speaking out loud to an empty chair and imagining that the person is really there.

“It’s not all doom and gloom,” Steiner adds. Though Singin’ to an Empty Chair navigates complex family dynamics, the band expertly weaves in candid honesty, chaos, and whimsy along the way. Humor finds its way into the conversation on the caffeinated anxiety anthem “Anywhere,” for which Steiner found inspiration in Sagan’s family dog. “Whenever Dave’s mom leaves the room, oh man, his whole world just falls apart,” she says. “You can see it in his face. I think a lot of us can relate to that sort of anxious attachment style.”

Ratboys
Singin’ to an Empty Chair
Tracklist
New West Records

1. Open Up
2. Know You Then
3. Light Night Mountains All That
4. Anywhere
5. Penny in the Lake
6. Strange Love
7. The World, So Madly
8. Just Want You to Know the Truth
9. What’s Right?
10. Burn It Down

Pre-order Singin’ to an Empty Chair by Ratboys HERE