Today, Seattle’s Spiral XP have shared the final preview from their debut album I Wish I Was A Rat, out October 18th via Danger Collective Records. “Window Room” packs skyward melodies and towering riffs in equal measure, bordering on slowcore but without the genre’s downward gaze. Paste Magazine praised the song, writing that the track blossoms “into brightened hues of gazing, augmented distortion.”
“I was inspired to write the lyrics while sitting in an enclosed porch one day and examining the window reflections,” shares the band’s bassist and co-vocalist Lena Farr-Morrissey, “Making plans of nothing and carving out time that is intentionally left blank, I found myself wondering what can bloom from recycled thoughts and memories. On the inside looking out, Window Room carries a longing for being at peace with the unknown.”
Across I Wish I Was A Rat, principal songwriter Max Keyes explores meaning, truth, and value under capitalism. Feeling unmoored by the ambient crush of a culture that prioritizes labor over pleasure, and data points over artistic expression, Keyes withdrew, finding solace in a new passion for songwriting. The resulting 12-song collection navigates late-twenties existential ennui and emerges triumphant, bending feedback drenched guitars into euphoric new shapes, imbued with the timeless stamp of Pacific Northwest melancholy.
After a string of promising EP’s, Keyes tapped scene veterans Lena Farr-Morrissey (bass, vocals), Jordan Mang (guitar), Kyle McCollum (guitar), and Daniel Byington (drums) to expand his vision on I Wish I Was A Rat, inviting them to augment the songs as they saw fit. “They ended up taking on a life of their own,” he explains, “that’s a little scary but also thrilling to me.” Keyes and the group enlisted producer JooJoo Ashworth (Corridor, SASAMI, Automatic) and decamped to The Unknown, the legendary Anacortes studio Phil Elverum helped construct in an abandoned church.
Spiral XP announced their record with lead single “Luna” a jagged, muscular track that pits Sonic Youth riffs against an Isn’t Anything era MBV chorus, capturing the feeling of overwhelming awe, wide with possibility. FLOOD Magazine praised the track, writing that it “balances errantly wailing riffs with hushed verses and awe-struck lyrics.”
On follow up single “Sinner,” Keyes imagines what it might be like to navigate the world with blind confidence, ultimately concluding that we’re all engaged in the same struggle: to find meaning in a culture that only equates value with profit. “I’m a sinner no big deal,” he sings with Farr-Morrissey, “Now I’m playing center field.” The laid back delivery lends every lyric a revelatory power, playful character studies that tow the line between fiction and diaristic confessions. Stereogum called it “entrancing, distorted greatness.”
In early 2020, just before the world ground to a halt, Max Keyes abandoned a short-lived move to Philadelphia and returned home to Seattle. The false start sparked a sort of existential crisis, and he quickly moved north to Bellingham where he’d grown up, hoping the sense of home might provide some grounding. An accomplished drummer with the acclaimed noise rock band Versing, Keyes began hammering out his own songs during this quieter time, approaching the guitar for the first time with serious intention. “It was good to have a couple of years just writing and becoming more confident,” he reflects. Spiral XP launched as a solo project in 2021 with the lo-fi and promising Drop Me In EP, quickly followed by successive EP’s It’s Been A While (2023) and TVXP (2024), a collaboration with the emerging Seattle band TV Star.
Recorded entirely in analog, I Wish I Was A Rat documents the band at their purest, embracing happy accidents and gritty recording artifacts. “It goes back to that search for authenticity,” says Keyes, “It has a lot of limitations and it makes recording harder, but those limitations make the process so much more meaningful and deep.” There’s a reverence for icons like Yo La Tengo, but the band sit more clearly in a lineage of influential bands from the Northwest like Broken Water, Unwound and Beat Happening. A singular distillation of grunge, indie, and slacker rock all wrapped in the region’s distinctive hue, I Wish I Was A Rat makes the compelling argument that we are more than our labor.
