Morning Zoo / What’s Right?
Ratboys are an indie band out of Chicago that serve just enough twang with their brand of emo nostaglia not to alienate listeners who missed that musical epoch. I am sure I will kick myself for that later. (If you also binge-watched the show, Overcompensating, you know the signature power of a well-placed My Chemical Romance song.)
With five studio albums under their belt and another on the way (due February 6), making a selection was a process. That is why I chose two songs this week, a question (“Morning Zoo”) and a tentative answer (“What’s Right?”).
Lead singer, Julia Steiner, writes poetically about indecision on “Morning Zoo” (2023) and ambivalence on the recently released, ”What’s Right?” (2025). I place indecision firmly within the pre-contemplative state of change, something happening below our threshold of awareness or at the periphery. In an interview with Paste, Steiner compared the song to “dissociating at a stop sign or weighing all your biggest hopes and fears while stuck behind the longest freight train you’ve ever seen.” These are the thoughts or subconscious messengers we encounter at moments of inattention. I like the juxtaposition of this cognitive drift as a place we both stumble into and tend to wear out our welcome. Interestingly, the lyrics betray a conscious decision to linger: “I kill my thoughts with a knife / then blow a kiss to the silence.” It is as if the songwriter does not trust herself to make a good on a promise or follow a line of thinking through to its inevitable conclusion. In the final line, she suggests we are locked in with the key: “I can say when if I wanted.” As Socrates conjectured, is the unexamined life worth living? What is the cost of unearthing it?
We contrast this stay of indecision with the post-choice state of ambivalence. The emotional toll of a decision is finally felt in “What’s Right?”
Was feeling so damn comfortable
Even though I couldn’t stay.
There is a forlorness there, even if one would not call it regret. It is true that ambivalence does not signal something wrong about your choice, per se. It is more an acknowledgment of the opportunity cost. We experience this as mixed emotions—self knowledge plus sadness. In “What’s Right,” Steiner has the right of way and a clear sense of direction that once got misplaced by anxiety.
For me, the most useful takeway from therapy has been to differentiate intuition (a gentle leader) from inner turmoil (a dictator that wants mountains moved—by any means necessary and by yesterday, if you don’t mind). I love and find deeply healing the metaphor of conscious knowing being a good night’s rest away, the idea of my subconscious being an (old) man that “vanish[es] when I need him to and “holds me when I sleep.” Remember, subtlety is an art. Most of us would not respond well to a whack upside the head from our subconscious. We need to learn to trust the caught breath, the butterflies, the unease. Translating these messages is fucking boss work. Shoutout to anyone else going to battle with their anxious mind!
Special mention goes to the vibrant “It’s Alive” and “Go Outside,” the COVID-era love letter celebrating simple pleasures with the assurance of a bygone era (“I want to take all my best friends, and show them where I live”). Shelter in place orders were just lifted, vaccines were readily available, and we thought things just might go back to normal again.
Wollen, Miranda. “Ratboys Release Morning Zoo.” Paste Magazine, 10 Aug. 2023, https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/ratboys/new-single-morning-zoo. Accessed 16 Nov. 2025.