{"id":1761390,"date":"2026-02-12T16:13:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T13:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1761390"},"modified":"2026-02-12T16:13:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T13:13:07","slug":"jenkem-mix-162-ratboys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1761390","title":{"rendered":"JENKEM MIX 162: RATBOYS"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nDiscovering a new genre of music is one of life\u2019s little joys. To navigate a web of unfamiliar bands, so giddy to learn more that you hardly make it to the end of a single song, is a special thing. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Last time it happened to me, I got lost in the sea of alt-country. And while I\u2019d come to find out about the genre\u2019s origins, coined the \u201cNo Depression\u201d era thanks to Uncle Tupelo\u2019s<\/a> 1990 album, I started with something far more current. <\/p>\n

Ratboys<\/a>. <\/p>\n

A four piece band out of the Chicago area, Ratboys represents the best of the alt-country genre. Full of heart, their twangy, rock influenced songs beg you to take life a little slower, to care for yourself, to roll the windows down. <\/p>\n

So, to celebrate their new album, Singin\u2019 To An Empty Chair<\/a><\/em>, frontwoman Julia Steiner, guitarist Dave Sagan, bassist Sean Neumann, and drummer Marcus Nuccio collaborated on Jenkem Mix 162. <\/p>\n

Check it out, and then scroll down for a fun interview with drummer and lifelong skateboarder Marcus Nuccio about the Chicago music scene, his musical upbringing, and being a part of many different bands. <\/p>\n

And of course, Download HERE<\/a> or forever hold your peace.\n <\/p>\n

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In addition to Mix 162, I called up drummer of Ratboys and lifelong skateboarder Marcus Nuccio. A warm Chicago soul, Marcus was kind enough to field my questions regarding his other bands, the Chicago music scene, and his skate-centric upbringing. Enjoy! <\/h2>\n<\/p>\n

Did skateboarding play a role in getting you into music? <\/strong>
\nIt all happened pretty organically. I was a big magazine kid, and I had subscriptions to Skateboarder<\/em>, Transworld<\/em>, and then of course Thrasher<\/em> which had the section at the end with band interviews. I ended up getting turned on to Modest Mouse and Fugazi and other stuff pretty young. So yeah, it all kind of went hand in hand. <\/p>\n

I remember I wasn\u2019t allowed to listen to music with swears and stuff as a little kid, so I would sneak stuff home and I snuck home a copy of Flip\u2019s Sorry<\/em>,<\/a> which is such a gnarly video, but my dad was more chill about it and he was like, \u201cThis guy hosting this video is the singer of the Sex Pistols<\/a>. Do you know what the Sex Pistols are, son?\u201d So I found out about early punk via Sorry<\/em>. That video blew my whole world open. I wanted to be a punk so bad after that.<\/p>\n

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How was the skate scene at that time? I\u2019m guessing you were living in the suburbs outside Chicago or something? <\/strong>
\nYep, born and raised in this town called Mundelein, which is up north. Maybe the old heads in the chat will remember Triple R Skatepark, which was this local indoor skatepark that happened to randomly be one of the best in the country. So we would get demos all the time. I got to see [Eric] Koston and [Andrew] Reynolds at demos. <\/p>\n

Of all the instruments, how\u2019d you land on drumming? <\/strong>
\nMy dad is a musician. He plays guitar and his favorite band when I was a kid was Rush. So he would show me old Rush concert footage. I thought Neil Peart<\/a> the drummer was like, I don\u2019t know, a God [laughs]. He\u2019s got 400 drums and he\u2019s going crazy. <\/p>\n

Then I heard Nirvana and my brain was like, \u201cI can kind of understand the drum parts.\u201d So I started to try to follow along. My dad got me an old crusty drum set and I spent days listening to music and trying to copy it. That was probably in sixth grade, and I was definitely skating at that time as well. <\/p>\n

And then when did you start taking music seriously and join a band? <\/strong>
\nI joined my first real band when I was a sophomore in high school. I befriended this dude who was in college in Chicago and he was writing these punk songs and we just started to book shows in the city. It snowballed from there. When I got out of high school we started to go on little regional tours and then touring across the country, and then I started meeting everybody that I still know now. His name is Jeff, and that band was called The Please and Thank Yous<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I noticed you\u2019ve been in what I would call a shit ton of bands over the years. <\/strong>
\n[laughs] Yeah, that\u2019s part of being a drummer. Everybody needs one. I spent a couple years through the 2010s being in six bands at once. I would have band practice and shows every single day. I\u2019m so thankful that it has solidified into just a couple focused projects, but god, I cut my teeth back then. I learned so much playing with so many different people, so many different styles, and different kinds of shows. It\u2019s beneficial to me now.<\/p>\n

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How do you keep songs memorized and separate when you\u2019re playing in six bands? <\/strong>
\nI don\u2019t know, man. I think as a drummer you have to have a certain music IQ. I think very melodically, and I have a knack for remembering melodies and the way that rhythm fits into them. I spend a lot of time listening to music though, so sometimes my brain\u2019s CPU gets full, and I\u2019ll be like, \u201cHow the fuck does that song go?\u201d <\/p>\n

Is there a margin of error that you\u2019re allowed while playing a show? Like do you ever improvise? <\/strong>
\nDude, a hundred percent margin of error [laughs]. And so much of it is intuition. As long as you\u2019re listening and making eye contact with your band members, you\u2019ll be ok. It might not be the exact notes that you recorded on the record, but you just hope that the crowd isn\u2019t scrutinizing your every move. Some freaks are out there like that, and they\u2019re like, \u201cI noticed you played that fill a little different,\u201d and I\u2019m like, \u201cHey, it\u2019s all jazz baby.\u201d <\/p>\n

Rat Boys is completely different from previous projects you\u2019ve been a part of, which I would describe as more Midwest Emo. Do you change your approach to drumming in this folk-y, indie-y, band? <\/strong>
\nIt\u2019s been super interesting and educational to play drums with Rat Boys after playing in a lot of louder emo punk bands. I\u2019m conscious about like, am I serving the song correctly? Am I playing over Julia [Steiner]\u2019s lyrics? And it leads to this really interesting strain of folk indie rock that Julia and Dave [Sagan] have been making for a long time. I definitely hear my emo power pop influences shining through still, but I\u2019m conscious of not just bashing over everything. It\u2019s a delicate balance. <\/p>\n

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And I kind of want to ask the same question but about the live shows. I\u2019m sure the room for Rat Boys is very different from the room with other projects? <\/strong>
\nA big thing is tempo. For a lot of Rat Boys music, the tempo needs to be reigned in a little bit to allow Julia to be able to sing her lyrics fully and to allow some of Dave\u2019s guitar parts to fully bloom on stage. With Pet Symmetry<\/a> [another band that Marcus is in] it\u2019s only three of us, and our singer Evan [Weiss] has a louder voice and his words come out faster. So tempo is out the window when I\u2019m playing Pet Sym shows. We can just freight train forward. Also, with Rat Boys the rooms tend to feel more cavernous, so there\u2019s literally more reverb when you hit the snare. So I have to make sure I\u2019m not just filling the room with loud noise. With Pet Sym, we usually play smaller clubs, so it\u2019s a lot tighter of a sound. You can kind of just bludgeon hits. <\/p>\n

[laughs] Does playing drums with Rat Boys stifle your ability to fully express yourself, or is there a benefit to holding back? <\/strong>
\nIt\u2019s a totally different kind of expression, and it\u2019s really gratifying to have discipline. I\u2019m really cognizant of smaller drum hits, and I\u2019m really using my ears and listening to my band mates. An awesome piece of advice I got really young was: The last thing you should be listening to is yourself. You should be listening to your band mates first to a point where you almost don\u2019t even hear yourself anymore. So I try to get into that mindset on stage with Rat Boys, and it feels awesome. It\u2019s just as gratifying crushing a slower, softer song as it is crushing a super loud fast one. It\u2019s just different.<\/p>\n

I often laugh at emo bands because it can feel like they\u2019re making music for angsty 16-year-olds when they\u2019re 35. So I was wondering, how much of this genre switch can be attributed to you simply getting older?<\/strong>
\nPet Sym toured a lot this year. We put out a record and played a good amount of DIY festivals, but we were absolutely the oldest dudes there [laughs]. These young kids are doing backflips on stage and you\u2019re like, \u201cOkay, it\u2019s a bit different now.\u201d I\u2019m just lucky to be in bands where the music held up. Pet Sym\u2019s lyrics aren\u2019t super juvenile or caught in these childish themes, so we can still sing our songs and not feel embarrassed. <\/p>\n

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Closing up, can you give me your Chicago music Mt. Rushmore? <\/strong>
\nAbsolutely, dude. The first band that came to mind is Joan of Arc<\/a>, which is Mike and Tim Kinsella. Those two are responsible for many, many bands in the Midwest emo genre, but to me, Joan of Arc is the pinnacle. It\u2019s also kind of the least listenable [laughs], but I love it so dearly. Then the band Tortoise<\/a>, who are this post-rock, absolute inventors of the genre in Chicago. To me, Tortoise sounds like Chicago. The buildings, the trains, the streets. The third, lesser-known band I\u2019ll say is Castevet<\/a>. They took a lot of what Tortoise and Joan of Arc were doing and made it into this kind of late 2000s sound, similar to Algernon Cadwallader<\/a> and Snowing<\/a>. Fourth, I mean, Wilco<\/a>. Dude, absolute champions of indie rock. They now run their own label and they record their own music in Chicago. Complete legends. <\/p>\n


\nWords by: Ben Komins<\/a>
\nHeader photo courtesy of: Miles Kalchik<\/a>
\nMixed by: Adrian Michna<\/a>
\nShare this with a folk-head on Facebook<\/a>
\nScroll your life away on Instagram<\/a> and Twitter<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Discovering a new genre of music is one of life\u2019s little joys. To navigate a web of unfamiliar bands, so giddy to learn more that you hardly make it to the end of a single song, is a special thing. Last time it happened to me, I got lost in the sea of alt-country. And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[226,282],"class_list":["post-1761390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crawlmanager","tag-jenkemmag-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1761390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1761390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1761390\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1761390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1761390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1761390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}