The Rat by The Walkmen: Pure Emotion
All about the hardest alt-rock song of the millenium.
“The Rat” by The Walkmen is not really unknown. It has 45 million streams on Spotify, and the song is over 20 years old now, and The Walkmen have cemented their credit as one of the first New York indie bands to emerge from the underground in the early 2000s. They didn’t end up having the same clout as the Strokes, or the National, or Vampire Weekend, or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. (Fun fact: Ezra Koenig actually used to intern for The Walkmen.) But in many ways “The Rat” has more oomph to it than the majority of most of those other bands’ entire discographies.
“The Rat” is the second song on the band’s 2004 album “Bows + Arrows”. It was written in all of about five minutes, after drummer Matt Barrick decided to go ham on the drums (as one does) and they built the rest of the song around it. They later had a producer work on the track, the result of which displeased the band, but it worked for everyone else: “The Rat” is their most popular song and remains their signature piece. It’s a hard song to perform, as lead singer Hamilton Leithauser has to scream into the microphone and Barrick has to go crazy on the drums for almost four minutes, save for the bridge. But it’s always worth it to listen to the song, live or otherwise.
The best way to describe “The Rat” is that it is HARD. Hard. There’s nothing soft about this song, not in Leithauser’s vocals, not in the lyrics, not in the music or the production. Even the bridge, which is gentler, has an edged undercurrent. The song is mostly fury, bitterness, anguish, and anger, but entirely raw. It’s emotion, pure and simple, and it’s punk. There’s nothing commercial or pop about this song whatsoever. The biting lyrics linger: “You’ve got a nerve to be asking a favor,/You’ve got a nerve to be calling my number,” and then a mix of, “Can’t you hear me, I’m calling out your name/Can’t you see me I’m pounding on your door/Can’t you hear me, I’m bleeding on the wall?”
It reads, and sounds, like a breakup song, and being pissed off at the ex but also wanting them back. It really does. And you can believe that with validity. The lyrics in the bridge more or less support it too. “When I used to go out, I would know everyone that I saw/Now I go out alone if I go out at all”. The song originally was called “Girls At Night”, which might mean the song’s actually from a woman’s perspective. It’s entirely possible.
I’ve known about the song since 2020, even though I knew who The Walkmen were back in 2017. (“Heaven” remains a favorite song of mine too.) But only recently did I start to consider that “The Rat” isn’t about a breakup. I’ve begun to believe that the song is about aging. You, in your youth, might’ve wanted what your adult self now has, but now you want that youth back. “You’ve got a nerve to be asking a favor”? You’ve got a nerve to be wanting something from me, when I can’t be young like you are anymore, and I want that youth back. And the lyrics in the bridge support this notion too. While breakups are universal, aging is even more so. The anger at the failures of the past, or having taken being young for granted, is real, understandable anger.
All of this is what makes “The Rat” so goddamned good, and why it’s my second favorite song of all time. It’s as real as any song is going to get, and it manages to sound good too. It remains one of the greatest alt-rock songs of the past twenty-five years, and its legacy will certainly endure for those like me, who need to feel something via song. This song will make you feel everything.