Dead Star Boys: Rats
Released 13 April 2026
CD | DL
4.0 out of 5.0 stars
Power chords and psychotic reactions: there’s a nervous tension at the heart of the Medway, and Dead Star Boys have got it perfectly sussed. Rats, their second album, works like a distillation of our disturbed times. Robert Plummer thrives on the pressure.
“We’re the Dead Star Boys/Heard them say we’re paranoid,” sings vocalist and bass player Viv Tucker in the defining moment of the Medway trio’s tough-as-nails sophomore release. Can’t think why that might be, Viv – maybe they’ve been paying attention to the lyrics you’re singing? It certainly makes a lot more sense than “people say we monkey around”, because there’s absolutely none of that going on here.
It’s been just a little over eight months since Dead Star Boys put out their eponymous debut disc, but the band have noticeably upped their game in the meantime. Lyrically, these 11 songs of doom and dystopia almost qualify as a concept album. Musically, the instrumentation is as tight as a coiled spring: the sound is still late 70s mod-punk, but with a new pressure-cooker intensity that enhances the band’s claustrophobic worldview.
It starts with the album’s only cover version, Plastic Age, originally a Buggles song. But its vision of a future gone wrong is all of a piece with the band’s own compositions – “They send the heart police to put you under cardiac arrest.” The same oppressive atmosphere haunts the protagonist of Lonely Boy, a powerless office worker “spied on every minute” who has just one wish: “Why can’t I meet a lonely girl?”
Jet Fighter focuses on dirty work at the military-industrial complex. A boy who was “part of the program to create a superman” becomes a war hero, but suffers from “coded messages in his dreams”. Then comes the title track, which looks at the plight of ordinary people, “scurrying like rats, falling down the cracks”.
Soldiers, a tale of mentally scarred veterans, has one of the most extraordinary codas you’ll hear all year: “Contracting horizons, we fear the silence/Closing in on us tonight.” Worse still are the childhood fears depicted in Don’t Turn Off The Light. “Out there the jackals will cheat us/You know it’s true, we’re helpless/The badlands will eat us,” sings Tucker.
You want it bleaker? One by one, the avenues of hope are blocked. Waiting For A Bomb is about people “dying slowly inside, don’t know there’s something wrong”: “I don’t believe in your career opportunities,” sneers Tucker.
Summer Has Gone invokes the aftermath of some science-fiction disaster: “Cold outside, there is no sun,” runs the lyric. “What is our purpose, the reason to be/Feed us our dreams and fantasies/Forever locked inside our rooms.”
That’s followed by Johnny’s Got A Gun, a look inside the mind of a potential school shooter: “Johnny’s got a Tommy gun, in his mind/For all the people he hates, he takes aim and fires.” The same Johnny could be the first-person narrator in the final song, Killed By Dreams: “You’re dead to me/Killed by dreams – the same old standard-issue fantasies.”
This series of nightmare scenarios is largely the work of drummer and chief songwriter Pat McGinn. But the lyrical content could easily become overwhelming, were it not for the dynamic effect of the band’s inexhaustible power-pop energy. McGinn himself is Dead Star Boys’ engine room, setting the pace with pounding precision, while Tucker’s fluid bass runs and James Feist’s all-out guitar attack complete the picture.
“We have tunes (and lyrics) that aren’t the usual type of clichés that most bands are turning out,” says McGinn, quite justifiably. It’s not every day that you get to hear such a song cycle of angst, albeit sweetened by memorable melodies and tight, disciplined arrangements. He also pledges that “this dystopian theme will carry through to the next album”.
It would be nice to think that by then, a happier global outlook will have rendered such narratives obsolete, but it would be foolish to bet money on it. For the time being, then, the Dead Star Boys are offering us the perfect way to face down the horrors of the world, while rocking on regardless. There’s no better sonic reflection of our age.
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Dead Star Boys are on Facebookhere. They are also onSoundcloudandInstagram.
All words by Robert Plummer. More writing by Robert can be found at hisauthor’s archive. He is also on X as @robertp926.
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