BIO Rats on Rafts — Deep Below
Pretty damn honored Rats on Rafts asked me to pen the official bio for their new album ‘Deep Below’, which you can order here.
You might say Rotterdam’s Rats and Rafts relationship with the past is complicated. Especially as a band never too keen on looking back. The revered punk rock experimentalists still remain highly unconcerned being called the harbingers of the quote unquote Dutch Invasion — an increasing number of refractory bands from The Netherlands making noise overseas.
The Rats’ proclivity for things eroded by the decay of time, however, has remained a constant in their rigorous hands-on ethos. The Moon Is Big (2011) Tape Hiss (2015) and Excerpts Of Chapter 3: The Mind Runs A Net Of Rabbit Paths (2021) are truly gripping timestamps of a band refusing to give in to the supposed ‘progress of the world’ — first as hungry punk rock upstarts, then as fiery analog recording dogmatists, and finally as raving mad psych rock thespians — toils and tales spilling over like some kind of Biblical torrent.
Instead of moving along with these volatile currents, Rats on Rafts stubbornly stand their ground in the subterranean hollows where their creativity always seems to thrive. The title of the group’s fourth album Deep Below — out February 7th 2025 on Fire Records — may be significantly less flashy and imaginative than its predecessor’s; it sums the recorded material up aptly and succinctly. For the waters have stilled, and barren, fog-strewn floodlands remain.
Within this misty monochrome afterworld, a tiny remote island of opportunity presented itself — a sonic direction deviating from the Rats’ habitual maelstroms of madness. A sound less rooted in the sprawling tomfoolery of The Fall, Van Dyke Parks and Syd Barrett and perhaps a little more kindred in the deserted stonework of Joy Division, early The Cure, and The Chameleons. Much of the material evokes that haunting scene in Ingmar Bergman’s post-war masterpiece Shame — a film that directly inspired the spectral “Voiceprint” — where a fishing boat of refugees becomes stuck in the waters between the floating dead bodies of the fallen.
Deep Below is Rats on Rafts’ most minimalist work since The Moon Is Big. Where the latter album was fueled by a brash bravado, these recordings meditate on sentiments of doubt, loss, and ageing. A big emotional catalyst was the band’s late close friend James Rubery, who remained repairman and tender of the many of the Rats’ old tape machines even when his own health was beyond repair. “He would joke and ask, ‘Aren’t you going to switch to a computer soon? And then we’d say ‘No, James, we’re not going to do that’ and he was secretly quite proud that there were people sharing those values,” singer/guitarist David Fagan remembers.
Like Excerpts, Deep Below was created at Rats’ basement studio in Schiebroek, beneath an office building located at an industrial estate. A place relatively remote from the buzz of Rotterdam’s rapidly gentrifying center. Zestienhoven Airport is close by, and airplanes frequently fly right overhead. It’s an easy place to get lost for those more accustomed to a Metropolitan nest, and therefore reflective of the music Fagan, Arnoud Verheul (guitars, voice), Natasha van Waardenburg (bass, synth, voice) and Mathijs Burgler (drums) would forge together in the coming months. Where some see emptiness, monotony and ruin, the Rats see ample space to maneuver their creativity to unexpected directions.
Triggered positively by a collaboration with Dutch producer Palmbomen (Kai Hugo) — resulting in the one-off single “Cashmere Carey”, Rats veered into the more elementary songwriting by chance and impulse. One of the grand MacGuffins of Deep Below was the ARP Solina String Ensemble, its built-in chorus-effect creating eerie overtones that hover around these songs like ghostly apparitions. Where in the past, musical ideas would be labored over repeatedly, peculiarly enough, many of the songs on Deep Below manifested themselves naturally — to the point where they didn’t need further scrutiny.
Lead single “Hibernation”, finds a strange joy in self-isolation. “I noticed that I could feel really comfortable with songs that can feel really heavy and isolated,” says Fagan “ If you listen to a Joy Division record for example, for a lot of people they’re really downcast. But for some people it’s like stepping into a really warm bath, because you can really identify with that music. I think that’s also what’s going on with “Hibernation”. I could identify with the coldness of the atmosphere, and that languid feeling of that song.”
By keeping the songs relatively slow-paced and sparse, deeper ruminations of mortality and alienation creep through the cracks. The Rats, a well-oiled touring machine who have performed alongside the likes of Franz Ferdinand, The Nightingales, De Kift and The Chills, played by ear and instinct, with the band members frequently switching instruments to unlock new ideas — then switching back to the original lineup to solidify them. “Nature Breaks”, the most propulsive song on Deep Below, thematically locks into this notion, as Fagan meditates on human impulse in the face of abject survival, and how those situations often unlock one’s true self.
“Japanese Medicine” — driven by a debris of icy guitars and galloping drums — sounds like a heavy echo of Rats’ nascent days of kicking against the establishment; the fallout of mutiny sickened into feelings of sorrow and reckoning. Fagan sings with strangled vulnerability about skulking abandoned buildings, bonding over records and going out drinking on weekends to see bands, encasing the restless days of youth in amber: ‘That’s how I remember you’.
The resounding “All These Things” channels the strange contradictions of looking at the future as a child, when you eagerly anticipate growing up and enjoying milestones like birthdays. Yet as an adult, you often long for the simplicity and freedom of childhood, feeling nostalgic for a time when life felt less complicated. On the hazy dream pop lurch of closer “Sleepwalking” Rats on Rafts sound almost like Cocteau Twins on benzos; the song was written by the band as a reminder to always leave the path open for the curious and the unexpected. No matter how many rabbit paths present themselves, you can always count on these Rotterdam dissidents to carve out their very own.
“I think people sometimes judge our way of working a little bit,” Fagan, ever-defiant, concludes, “In the sense that it would be overly time-consuming. So it’s not so much wanting to look back, but just wanting to keep doing it our way, the way we think the music should be. The world is such that things have to always change and grow continuously with the latest technical developments and trends. And that is not really necessary for us as a band. We don’t have a need to grow along with that.”
