Crooked Words #11: Ratboys, Lizzie Reid, Sophia Yau-Weeks

tom johnson

11 Feb 2026 — 3 min read

Ratboys - Burn It Down

As Singin' To An Empty Chair, the new album from Chicago's Ratboys, runs on from its spiky outset, through a series of charming, occasionally boisterous songs, you get an ever-increasing feeling of satisfaction. For more than a decade now, the band have ripped and ridden through a whole host of gleaming, smart, endlessly enjoyable songs and albums, each shifting just enough in tone, in vision, to separate it from what's come before.

Satisfaction then, that the band have achieved a similar feat once again on their sixth LP, released last week. Satisfaction, however, is a strange sentiment, hinting at something close to conformity, of boxes ticked, of expectations met. Important things, no doubt, but also a feeling that seemingly leaves space for more; for things that goes beyond desire and into bold new worlds altogether.

Just as we're settling into the comfort of familiarity, Ratboys – thankfully, hearteningly – flick a switch and manage just that, bursting through the surface and finding bold new colours, sights and sounds to work with.

Such a leap is perhaps best exemplified on 'Burn It Down', the album's penultimate track. Beautifully engrossing, it's a hefty, anguished, heartfelt ramping-up that spreads its fiery wings across seven-minutes of simmering vocals and hefty instrumental passages. Further more, the whole thing is all wrapped up with that visceral, thrilling notion that the whole thing might well collapse at any moment and drag us all down with it.

It doesn't of course, in fact it seems to grow in stature the more they throw at it, flowing and glowing as it builds and fully lets loose, before it falls and dissipates once more, frayed and untethered. It's a uniquely powerful song, a singular moment on an album you get the feeling will reveal more and more again the longer you bury yourself within it.

And so here is a place to start.

Lizzie Reid - Sweet Relief

Glasgow's Lizzie Reid has been a mainstay of both the city and country's considered musical underbelly for a while now, releasing her own excellent music as well as providing backing to the likes of Jacob Alon and, more recently, Katie Gregson-MacLeod.

Reid is stepping back out into her own spotlight this year, however, and has just announced a brand new EP, Undoing, to be released on April 17th. Our introduction to it arrives with swagger and a steely-eyed sense of purpose. Informed by Reid's own dealings with "obsession, rumination, depression, and panic", 'Sweet Relief' plays out like a brooding soundtrack to such sentiments, a heave of spiky guitars and driving percussion.

The new track also features a guest-turn from Hamish Hawk, and it's a collaboration that makes sense; the song carrying a foreboding sense of darkness to it, a palpable edge that Hawk so often excels at on his own terms. Knotty, beautifully atmospheric, it makes for an intense and hypnotic next-step. A darkness descending.

Sophia Yau-Weeks - Nobody's Laughing

There are many reference points you could place front and centre here – Sadurn's drifting ballads, the tenderness of Florist – but perhaps what 'Nobody's Laughing' does best is to immediately feel like it belongs to its own sad but compelling world.

Tied in with the announcement of Misty Mountain, a debut album that arrives April 3rd via Lavasocks Records, 'Nobody's Laughing' makes for a gently captivating introduction to the work of Sophia Yau-Weeks. Though based in California, much of the album was written during a two-year stay in London, and the song does indeed carry a kind of displaced sense of longing in its mouth and heart; a murky shadow that exists between the places we try to label 'home'.

Sophia describes the song as “a snapshot of a time that was filled with great grief and self-reflection," and those sentiments seep out of the song too, her voice holding scraps of memories, of desires, that we only catch small glimpses of here but are tangible in their significance, their melancholy.

A captivating start-point, check it out below.