The Essex four-piece are back with snarling new single BROKEN, lifted from a record self-produced in two sheds in Suzi Quatro’s back gardenโฆ
Wordsย byย Felix Bartlett | April 30, 2026
Hot on the heels of 2024’s SUBURBIA CALLING, Rat Boy have officially announced their fourth full-length, CRASH!.
The 18-track record is set to arrive on June 26 via Tim Armstrong’s Hellcat Records, and the Essex gang of Jordan Cardy (vocals, guitar), Harry Todd (guitar), Liam Haygarth (bass) and Noah Booth (drums) have previewed it with the snarling, riff-heavy BROKEN, co-written with the Rancid frontman himself.
Self-produced by Cardy and Booth alongside Armstrong, CRASH! was tracked in deeply unconventional surroundings: two sheds in singer-songwriter Suzi Quatro’s garden, with Booth literally sprinting between them to hit record before running back to the kit.
“The room wasn’t soundproof, it was a single thin wooden room with no deadening, so the drum kit sounded so insane and live,” Cardy explains of the sessions. “We didn’t need to add any triggers to the drums; it’s all real! We all shared a headphone mix through splitters, and we pretty much couldn’t hear what we were playing. I think it might have only been in one ear, too, so we had to trust ourselves that we were playing tight.”
“I wanted the process to be as close as possible to how it would have been done before computers, to keep the artwork feeling authentic and rooted in a physical, hands-on tradition,” Cardy says. “In the same way the album itself favors rawness and immediacy, I didn’t want the artwork to feel overly polished or digitally constructed.”
Watch the video for BROKEN below:
And check out the A Stranger To You album cover:
Catch the band live at the following:
Rat Boy 2026 European tour dates
July
11 Periam Port, RO Rock La Mures
August
14 Volynฤ, CZ Summer Punk Pรกrty Volynฤ
October
30 Nuremberg, DE Lรถwensaal
31 Erfurt, DE HSD
November
19 Salzburg, AT Rockhouse
20 Vienna, AT Szene
21 Prague, CZ Rock Cafรฉ
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