SpongeBob Memes And Childhood Artifacts Inspired Ratboys's Best Album Yet

In the early 20th century and before, a young “printer’s devil” would help set type and tidy the floors in print shops. He learned his trade as all apprentices do, by watching cautiously and, eventually, by doing. Julia Steiner, who leads Midwestern musical group Ratboys, noticed herself with a unique task not long ago: ordering looking through decades of memories and artifacts as her parents cleared out her childhood residence in Louisville, Kentucky. She’d become the printer’s devil of her own life.


Steiner trekked back to the residence she grew up in, down in the Kentucky humidity and sunshine, with trusted Ratboys collaborator Dave Sagan. The two formed the musical group in the 2010s soon after meeting at the University of Notre Dame; two albums later, and right after dozens of good SpongeBob tweets shared in the van on the way to live gigs, they required a location to finalize and demo some expansive new songs, just as she’d done in high school. They picked the only room left with a bed in it.


“Logistically it was really easy,” Steiner told MTV News. “No one was there, needless to say, because my parents had already moved out, and we camped out in their bedroom, which was sort of funny. It had tall ceilings. We got to just turn up and camp out in that space and attempt to go out with a bang, as far as just writing some music in that home for one more time.”





The fruits of their excursion burst forth on Printer’s Devil, the adventurous third Ratboys album out this Friday, February 28, by way of the Topshelf Records. (You can hear an advance stream of the album above.) It picks up the folksy yarn from 2017’s GN and knits an entire wardrobe out of it, merging pop-punk and moony ballads with one experimental jam that could conveniently double its 4:32 runtime and still not overstay its welcome.


That jam is the title track, a spaced-out vision inspired by epics like Wilco’s 10-minute “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” and Cat Power’s 18-minute “Willie Deadwilder.” Steiner mentioned they chased “the idea attempting to prepare more of a meditation or a mantra” and ended up making her preference song on the album. “We jammed on that little pattern for 20 minutes. I feel like I could play that for a hour. It's so nice. I'm delighted that we were able to write a song like that, that feels intentional nevertheless also has a ton of open space and just had space in itself to go where it needs to go.”


Ratboys have visited the jamosphere before, often allotting guitarist Sagan ample real estate on live versions of GN’s airy “Dangerous Visions.” However "Printer’s Devil” feels like a turning point, a statement that finds the order unlocking new horizons for themselves. As a substitute opposed to cutting ad-hoc vocal takes in a campus chapel or laundry room like they did once Ratboys started, Steiner and Sagan summited the attic of a hollowed-out home, afterward bailed soon after 10 minutes without air conditioning, mellowed out over some Kentucky backroad drives, walked around familiar parks, and funneled those simple, powerful moments into their best album nevertheless. “They sound cliché or novel any time as soon as you just read them on a lyric sheet. Nevertheless for me it is grounded in real memories that I cherish,” Steiner said.


She opens “Look To” as a little bit girl “bombing hills in the summertime” and closes the loop on “I Go Out at Night,” a song she started writing as a teenager and finished at her parents’. “Photographs fill my mind,” she sings, “I’m sleeping here for the last time.” Its emotionality lives in the loss, rendered in detail by Sagan's dreamy fills and Steiner’s specificity of place; its Halloween-themed video finds the four-piece musical group — Steiner and Sagan, plus Sean Neumann on bass and Marcus Nuccio on drums — haunting the suburbs in their trick-or-treating best. Just one track before, on “Anj,” Steiner lays out a tender ode to a former babysitter who she’s kept in touch with as they’ve both grown older. Musically, it’s a firecracker.


“We demoed through it two or three different times because we weren’t really sure how to just keep the energy carrying over,” Sagan mentioned. “The lyrics got really intense from verse to verse, and then by the end, you really wish to bring the energy up. We were really indecisive on, should this be a chiller song?” The demo is lovely, brimming with that chunky octave riff that gives the song its immediacy, nevertheless Sagan mentioned the real magic happened thanks to Nuccio’s explosive drumming.


Printer’s Devil is full of level-up moments like this, sonic embellishments that unify the album and more closely echo the dynamic Ratboys live experience. Unlike the band’s previous LPs, the musicians who played in Ratboys on the road are the same who recorded the album, lending every crunch and chord change added tightness. “We went through this period where we were playing with a bunch of different drummers” — nine, to be exact — “and every time, every lineup was a slightly different sound, also. Sean and Marcus have been there for a long time right now, and they're permanent. We just really wanted to capture that.”


Left to right: Dave Sagan, Julia Steiner, Marcus Nuccio, and Sean Neumann


The chemistry also comes from the four also playing in Jupiter Styles, a musical group fronted by Neumann, and the fact that Steiner, Sagan, and Neumann all live with each other in Chicago. This permits for being “very attuned to one another’s sense of humor and mood,” Steiner mentioned, and there’s a palpable feeling in both listening to the album and seeing a Ratboys show that these people actually all really like each other — Steiner and Sagan especially. They’ve been a couple for seven years, though they don’t like to prepare it the focus of the band’s story. There’s also little time for romance once the requires of a tour beckon.


“But at the same time, you need to prepare space for that away,” Sagan mentioned, prompting Steiner to dig a little bit deeper: “We're so lucky because even if we're not able to express all of the different facets of our relationship on the road, we're still with other each day, all day, and that is an enormous comfort for me. Honestly, I don't know if I could go on tour without Dave.”


There aren’t several Ratboys songs about their relationship. “Pretty much none of these. No offense, Dave,” Steiner mentioned. Nevertheless she writes about different types of love. “Anj” celebrates the symbiotic developments of a decades-spanning friendship. Meanwhile, “My Hands Grow” probes inward with lines like “I know that it’s hard to feel my love” as images of clouds and blades of grass float by. Printer’s Devil’s love songs are unexpected.


Also unexpected: that two musical partners who linked up in South Bend, Indiana, wouldn’t gravitate toward Pete Buttigieg in the 2020 Presidential election. He was mayor as soon as they lived there, and he even came to a show at a famed DIY space. They’d visualize him around town, and so they fancied him. Steiner mentioned she was excited if he reported his campaign last year, yet since then, “things have changed. I feel like he pivoted to the big picture and the wider race a little also soon for my taste.”


As a substitute, Steiner and Sagan played an acoustic set at a Davenport, Iowa, rally in support of Bernie Sanders. Right following the senator thanked them by name in his preamble, the clip amassed thousands of likes and retweets.


“His plans for health care are so important,” Steiner mentioned. “It's really hard being a musician, self-employed and having to rely on government health insurance. A lot of young artists are attracted to his campaign for that, although for so several other reasons too.”


“Bernie Sanders is the most well known person I've ever met,” Sagan adds.


It’s possible that Printer’s Devil could change that. Ratboys are set for a headlining tour, playing longer sets in bigger rooms to more receptive audiences, and even several gigs opening for their heroes in Wilco. It all still feels like the exhilarating starting of something much greater. Still, Steiner often uses the @Ratboysband Twitter stage name to champion her friends’ assignments and good SpongeBob moments more than her own musical group. "I will share those memes on Twitter forever up until someone forces me to stop," she mentioned. She’s just happy to keep playing if they can, for whoever will listen.


“It would just go against all of my instincts to suppress any group kind of enthusiasm or hype I'm feeling,” she mentioned. “I just wish to shout from mountaintops all of the cool stuff that's going on.” Luckily, Ratboys just made the ideal album of their career. This time, plenty of others can do the shouting.