Recorded in two sheds in Suzi Quatro’s garden, Rat Boy’s fourth album sheds none of the sleaze or slacker wit for something braver: their most open-hearted and most immediate record yet

Words by Felix Bartlett  | June 24, 2026

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If you’re anything like me, you’ll remember the noise around Rat Boy when they came tearing out of nowhere to ransack festival stages with that sleazy Essex indie sound. It was fresh, it was filthy, it was a bloody good time, and it got a lot of us through our uni years. The lazy assumption is that Jordan Cardy’s lot are still just snotty anthems, British slacker humour and anarchic attitude. CRASH! cheerfully blows that up. The DIY roots are planted as deep as ever, only now there’s real emotional nerve running through them.

The backstory is almost too good to be true. Eighteen tracks knocked out in two sheds in Suzi Quatro’s garden, Cardy and drummer Noah Booth co-producing alongside Rancid‘s Tim Armstrong, Booth reportedly sprinting between sheds to hit record before diving back behind the kit. You can hear every bit of that chaos. CRASH! breathes the spirit of classic punk recordings, rough at the edges without ever sounding unfinished, a band forever teetering on the brink and hauling it back at the last possible second.

Nothing here outstays its welcome. Opener Broken is gone inside two minutes, and most of what follows barely troubles the three-minute mark, which is precisely what gives it all that immediate impact. High Life, Away Days and the giddy Baseball Bat weld British indie rock to skate-punk muscle, while Gun To My Head and Sick Of It bare the band’s rawer teeth.

The real surprise sits in the contrasts. Between the euphoric blowouts come moments with more texture: The River, lifted by an unexpected glockenspiel, and the gloriously Dookie-adjacent Blind. Make Me Stay is the one that lodges itself fastest, Cardy’s needling observations about friends, everyday life and the absurdities of the world riding a mid-90s crunch and a chorus built to be bellowed straight back at him. Even the interludes earn their keep. The folky, one-minute Night Bus lands like a snapshot of a drunken walk home and ushers you into a second half stacked with the album’s best: S.O.S, Dead End and the snarling Arrested Development, all of them balancing catchy choruses against raw punk energy.

Cardy carries every inch of it, that voice forever shifting between defiant and melodic, present and sure of itself in a way the bedroom-recorded early days only ever hinted at. Closer No Stars resists the easy temptation of one last anthem, letting CRASH! bow out on feel rather than fireworks. Eighteen songs, gone in a blur of just over 40 minutes, and the work of a band that knows exactly who it is while still poking around for new corners to explore.

Rat Boy have always had grit and gloom lurking under the gags. Here, for the first time, they let you properly see it. CRASH! sticks its tongue out, drops its trousers and means every second of it. Some of their most mature work, and somehow their most immediate too.

Verdict: 💀💀💀💀

For fans of: Green Day, The Offspring, Soft Play

CRASH! is released on June 26 via Hellcat Records