At the end of a course titled Gender and Rock Culture, Professor Mary Celeste Kearney requires students to complete either a research paper or a creative project, which is how Julia Steiner ’14 ended up recording two original rock songs that counted as 20 percent of her grade for the Film, Television and Theatre class she took during her last semester at Notre Dame.
Most students’ finals survive only on Professor Kearney’s hard drive — she keeps everything. But you can listen to Steiner’s submissions, the songs “Collected” and “Space Blows,” on Spotify, where they have racked up more than 1,000,000 streams between them.
Steiner is the lead singer, songwriter and rhythm guitarist for the Chicago-based Ratboys, the most prominent rock band to come out of Notre Dame in more than 20 years. Thanks to five acclaimed full-length albums — with a sixth set for release in February 2026 — and a busy touring schedule of fun and energetic live shows, Ratboys have developed a loyal and growing fanbase. They have toured with established acts like The Decemberists and Kim Deal, and made their debut at the massive Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago this past summer. They played 85 shows during a busy 2024, including many at 2,500-seat venues like Milwaukee’s Riverside Theater and The Anthem in Washington, D.C. Walmart used their song “Go Outside” in an ad campaign. Steven Hyden, one of the top music critics in the country, put Ratboys’ 2017 LP, GN, on his list of the 100 greatest indie albums of the 21st century.
Steiner started the band 15 years ago in her Breen-Phillips Hall dorm room with Dave Sagan ’15. Drawing on Steiner’s background as an acoustic guitar-playing singer-songwriter performing in coffee shops in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, Ratboys’ early music stayed mostly in a folk idiom. Gender and Rock Culture nudged Steiner to plug in and get way louder. She had learned in the course how electric guitars were left mostly to boys throughout rock history, while girls typically felt more comfortable doing the acoustic thing — just as Steiner had.
“Collected,” 100 percent composed and recorded for the class, is written from the perspective of a female musician talking to other women about the challenges they face in the field. She wrestles with the misconceptions that women are always sentimental songwriters and that they’re generally unable or unwilling to develop technical musical chops. Sonically, the song’s a banger that wouldn’t feel out of place on classic rock FM radio.
Now, more than a decade after Steiner and Sagan graduated from Notre Dame, Ratboys are going strong — and loud. Steiner’s conscious choice to “dominate aural space,” as she wrote, quoting the sociologist Mary Ann Clawson in the paper she handed in to Kearney with the two songs, was a turning point for the band. It’s an example of how intentional and thoughtful Steiner is with her music, akin to the English major’s tendency to choose every word with the care of a poet.
Yet despite that auditory shift, Ratboys have not abandoned their folk roots. Listening to their albums, you encounter what Sagan calls a “variety show” as they move seamlessly and intentionally among Americana-inflected twang, blistering punk and jam-band grooves that approach 10-minute runtimes. It all works, their output across genres united by rich melodicism, poetic and personal storytelling, tight band chemistry and Steiner’s distinctive singing voice, which has been described as plaintive, soothing, warm and pensive. (None of those adjectives quite capture her sound. There’s a bit of country-music Kentucky drawl in there. You just have to hear her for yourself.)
That Ratboys are making it as an indie group in 2025 is no small feat, considering how unforgiving the American music industry is for anyone not at the top of the pop pyramid. And their 15-year journey is a great Notre Dame and South Bend story: The University and the city together incubated of one of the country’s hardest-working, most critically celebrated rock bands. Hyden calls them “a ‘best-kept secret’ . . . a band you want to see do well.”
The musical and personal connection between Steiner and Sagan began in the most “college circa 2010” way possible: They met in a Facebook group for incoming freshmen in Notre Dame’s class of 2014. Steiner noticed a funny comment Sagan posted in the chat and saw he was playing a Rickenbacker bass guitar in his profile photo. She clicked “add friend” and they traded a few messages.
They met in person on campus that fall, “one of those miraculous meetings where you just feel comfortable with someone immediately,” Steiner says. Beyond the shared love of music, they discovered divergent musical backgrounds and favorite artists. While Steiner had taught herself to play folk guitar in her childhood bedroom, Sagan spent his high school years playing in punk bands around Chicago’s south suburbs. They burned albums for each other off their laptops. Soon, they started to jam. The first time they played together, messing around on acoustic guitars late one weekend night in Steiner’s room, they made up a joke song Steiner remembers as the “parietals blues,” bummed that the arrival of 2 a.m. meant they had to stop playing for the night. They began dating that autumn and remain romantic partners today.
Confirmed night owls, they worked around the residence halls’ visiting hours policy by scouting out late-night locations for jamming. As a bassist in the Notre Dame Jazz Band, Sagan had 24-7 swipe-card access to the Ricci Band Rehearsal Hall, so they’d often head there in the middle of the night to work on songs.
It didn’t take long for them to develop a creative rapport. One night in the band building, Steiner remembers singing a song called “Key” that she had written in high school. “You wanna play it again?” Sagan asked when she finished. Steiner thought that was a weird request; she felt self-conscious and didn’t want to bore Sagan with the repetition. He encouraged her to play it a few more times — maybe they’d figure out a new part to include or find something to tweak. “Becoming comfortable with repetition and that symbiotic exchange of ideas was really helpful for me because now, that’s what it is,” Steiner says, emphasizing Ratboys’ collaborative approach while turning a rough idea into a polished product.
In time they decided to record some songs, which they released on the internet platform Bandcamp that April under the name Ratboy, Steiner’s high school-era nickname that emerged from a lunch-table game of “give your friends a weird and silly nickname.” (The s was added before long, after another musician using “Ratboy” sent them a weird email threatening legal action — an early sign their music was reaching a wider audience than they imagined.) Sagan sent the songs to musician buddies back home. They dug it. “‘OK, this is pretty cool,’” he remembers them saying. “‘Who is this Julia?’”
The positive response encouraged them to keep going, which they did in a big but casual way, gigging wherever they could. They played University-sponsored Acousticafe shows and threw together a scrappy set in the art building, Riley Hall, where the audience pulled out folding chairs or sat on the floor. They’d play in the basement of Breen-Phillips or the 24-hour snack bar Reckers or the courtyard outside the Mendoza College of Business. “We just kind of made ourselves at home on campus,” Steiner says. “It was just kind of fun to go a little rogue and play music in places where you weren’t necessarily supposed to.”
They lived as a working band in whatever time they could find within packed student schedules — Sagan was in the infamously demanding School of Architecture while Steiner complemented English literature and peace studies with her work on the student magazine Scholastic, where she eventually became editor-in-chief. And they were doing this at a school not known for producing student rock bands. You can find plenty of musical outlets at Notre Dame — the symphony orchestra, the marching band, a bunch of sacred music choirs, the glee club — but you can too-easily go four years on campus and never hear a student rock band.
So, it would be fair for Steiner and Sagan to say the campus music culture stunted their growth until they could move onto better things after graduation. But they both speak fondly of their time at Notre Dame, offering two main reasons for appreciating that era in their lives.
First, they found their people. Steiner is quick to shout these folks out: their friend and fellow musician Nick Gunty ’12, who invited Ratboys to play that unsanctioned show in Riley Hall; Malcolm Phelan ’12, a student-activities impresario who booked them at Reckers and promoted their music to anyone who’d listen; Rachel Kellogg, the Breen-Phillips rector, who let the band play a show in the basement common area.
Steiner deeply valued her academic adviser, Professor Joseph Stanfiel, who encouraged her to pursue her growing passion for music as long as she kept her grades up. She recalls how Eimear Clowry Delaney, a staff member at Notre Dame’s program in Dublin, helped her plug into the city’s famous busking and pub scenes during her year there. Ultimately, Steiner and Sagan found supportive people throughout the University community and enjoyed that they didn’t have to face a super-competitive arts atmosphere — the environment allowed this fun side-pursuit to develop slowly. Only after graduation did it feel like Ratboys was worth trying out as a career.
The second big lift was getting off campus and connecting with musicians and live-music lovers in the city, a flourishing and hospitable crowd even if there weren’t many other Notre Dame students joining in. They played bar sessions like McCormick’s open jams, where patrons could walk on stage, pick up a house instrument and play with whoever came out on a particular night.
Most important was “The Pool,” an apartment in South Bend that served as an intimate live music and events space from 2011 to 2015. The city’s former Central High School had been converted into apartments, and plenty of original elements remained. To this day you can live in the old gymnasium, a classroom, the boiler room — or the swimming pool. The front door to that apartment opens onto what had been the pool deck, and the living space below is the drained pool itself, still with the original cinder block walls. During their time, residents Gus Bennett and Dena Woods filled the space with secondhand couches and chairs. Typically 40 to 50 people — sometimes upwards of 100 — crammed in for free live shows each week, which featured local and touring acts playing from what had been the deep end of the pool while spectators watched from the shallow end and up on the pool deck.
In the fall of 2013, returning to Notre Dame after a year in Rome for Sagan and in Dublin for Steiner, Ratboys started hanging out at The Pool, playing and listening to other acts. “It became this very welcoming, just beautiful space. It was a massive part of our lives,” Steiner says. “Looking back now, it made me feel comfortable and safe in a DIY environment, in a way that I felt empowered to go seek that out in other places around the U.S.”
With The Pool as a springboard, the local music scene took off — and Ratboys were there to help build it. Woods helped organize a music festival called Sounds by South Bend, which in its heyday featured some 60 artists performing in venues all over town. Ratboys played the main stage at the State Theatre. Everyone who was around during that time speaks of it with near reverence — the word “magical” is used a lot.
After graduation, Steiner moved to Chicago to work for a public relations firm, a job she wasn’t excited about. Sagan had one more year in the five-year architecture program, which he spent living at The Pool. They found time to record their debut LP, AOID, at a studio in Chicago, and Steiner pitched the idea of a self-organized tour after Sagan finished school. “We’re young and we can always pivot,” he remembers thinking at the time. “But this is the best time to chase the dream.”
The tour started the day after Sagan’s graduation: 22 basements and bars in 22 days, from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to New Orleans, often performing for 10 people or fewer. AOID came out in June, the title’s source a photo of a bright blue handstamp Steiner received at a Kentucky county fair she and Sagan attended the summer after their freshman year. They had made a pact the photo would be the cover of their debut album if they ever made one together.
Sagan’s parents weren’t thrilled at first that he wasn’t going to start his architecture career right away, but they were supportive enough to let him try rock and roll out for a while. Steiner’s family allowed the band to use their old SUV to travel the country, and her father would slip her gas money any time they came through Louisville.
Meanwhile, they found they could make pretty good money working for DoorDash, Instacart and the like, which helped them pay the bills and keep touring.
They toured for two years, playing with more people for a bigger sound — they’ve had 10 different drummers over time. Then in 2017 a booking-agent friend-of-a-friend heard them play in New York and offered to work with them, which led to more established gigs opening for popular indie acts. “That was kind of the wake-up call for me: that people who work in the music industry might want to invest their time into what we were doing,” Steiner says. “It was a validating thing where we realized that maybe we could take this even a bit more seriously.”
By that time, Ratboys had released their second LP, GN. They filled out their permanent lineup with veteran musicians Sean Neumann on bass and backup vocals and Marcus Nuccio on drums. Reaching this new level of success didn’t mean they could stop their side hustles. Steiner still occasionally works for an events company and Sagan does some freelance illustrating and architectural drafting. They still drive themselves on tour — though they replaced the SUV with a van a few years ago — and they load their own equipment and sell their own merchandise before and after shows. More than once they’ve taken the initiative on new recordings without direct label support.
The economics of indie rock in the age of streaming music services like Spotify and Apple Music depend on this sort of self-sufficiency and near-constant touring. Most artists earn between $0.003 and $0.005 per Spotify play, which means Ratboys’ 125,000-plus streams per month net about $550 monthly for the whole band — nowhere near enough to live on.
“It’s frustrating to see people like [Spotify CEO] Daniel Ek growing extremely rich on the backs of artists,” Steiner says. “My attitude is: I use Spotify, I love using it, it’s incredible. It’s an insane abundance. And for that reason, I would happily pay $60 a month. I think it should be much more expensive than it is.”
As Ratboys geared up for their first headlining tour in support of their 2020 album, Printer’s Devil, the coronavirus pandemic arrived. The tour was canceled. Ratboys survived by pivoting online. They streamed a “virtual tour” on Twitch, which featured them joking around and playing music for fans who tuned in for an hour or two at a time. “Nobody really knew what the future of live music was going to be,” Sagan says. “[The virtual tour] definitely kept us sane and scratched an itch for music performance we couldn’t get any other way. We kept our minds occupied because we had to learn so many different skills — becoming a broadcaster, a broadcast engineer and a video editor.”
They also launched an online community via the Patreon platform at that time. They called it “The Rat Room,” a place where fans could hear demos and interact with the band for a monthly subscription fee. Sagan, Steiner and Neumann all lived in the same house during that time, so they were able to keep making music. After the 2021 release of Happy Birthday, Ratboy, a re-recording of some of the band’s earliest material — including the two songs Steiner submitted in Kearney’s class — Ratboys reached a new level of buzz with their 2023 album, The Window.
The title track is a great introduction to what makes the band’s music special: a piece of pandemic-adjacent art you won’t mind playing on repeat even if you’d rather never think about COVID-19 again. The window in the song is a real window at the hospital wing of an assisted-living facility where Steiner’s grandmother, Sue Palumbo, was nearing the end of her life. It was 2020, the height of the pandemic, and Steiner’s family wasn’t allowed to visit. One day, Palumbo’s nurse called the family and said it would be a good idea to come see her for what would likely be the last time. So, Steiner’s grandfather Paul Palumbo — Sue’s husband of 63 years — drove with her mother, sister and aunt to the facility and said goodbye to Sue through an open window of her ground-floor room. She died a few hours later.
Steiner couldn’t be there that day, so her mother called her with the news and shared things her grandfather had said during his goodbye. Steiner wrote those words down and began to compose the song a few weeks later. In the opening verse, she sings in the first person from her grandfather’s perspective:
I walked across the green grass
To where I knew you laid
The way the sun was shining down
I only saw your shape
But I need to tell you everything
Before it’s too late
That I don’t regret a single day
And you’re so beautiful
It might read like a tearjerker, and the song is deeply emotional. But after that quiet first verse and chorus, with Steiner singing over an acoustic riff, the full band comes in, up-tempo and elegiac. A stirring outro ends the song with the line “I feel you with me” repeated three times.
It would have been easy to cast the song as a straight-on ballad, and Steiner says the band experimented with different musical approaches. The finished, driving version captures a range of feelings and experiences in a way a classic ballad might not have: relief at being able to say goodbye when that was impossible for millions of people; gratitude for a long, loving relationship; the catharsis of emptying your heart to someone one final time. “It’s actually so joyous in the context of that loss,” Steiner says. “Especially in the context of the pandemic and how strained and complicated that made everything, it was such a miracle to me that my Grandpa and Grandma were able to have that experience of saying goodbye to one another through the window.”
The Window showcases Steiner’s careful attention to the details of her life. Musically, it’s the sound of a band in lockstep, from drummer Nuccio’s propulsive grooves to bassist Neumann’s beautiful, high-register vocal harmonies to Sagan’s melodic guitar licks that fit Steiner’s voice like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
The band’s chemistry is as strong in their live shows as it is on record. Steiner’s vocals fill the room, and you can see close-up the technical musicianship of Sagan’s lead guitar work, which sounds so natural and almost effortless on albums. “It’s a little bit self-indulgent,” Sagan says of putting on a rock show. “It’s cool to let loose on stage and see how the crowd reacts. It’s about just making the experience big and special for everybody there, including us.”
A common dynamic when Ratboys opens for another act is that a largely unfamiliar crowd will move from polite applause early in the show to huge cheers of appreciation by the set’s final third. And the band often only has 30 minutes to win people over. Their merch line will swell with dozens of new fans eager to meet Steiner and buy a T-shirt or vinyl LP. “You get this feeling when you play that is transcendent. It’s special,” Sagan says. “It feels like this moment is not going to last, so let’s give it our all right now. It’s lightning in a bottle.”
Notre Dame alumni who catch Ratboys on their next tour will feel in-the-know if the band includes The Window track “I Want You (Fall 2010)” on that night’s setlist. The song is a love letter from Steiner to Sagan, and to their early days in South Bend. It begins, “I could tell that we’d be friends / From the first moment, we walked around and started talkin’ / All about our favorite bands / Got a quarter dog and snuck you in at 2 a.m.”
The Huddle no longer sells quarter dogs, and Steiner jokes that she doesn’t think the University can retroactively discipline her for parietals violations. Yet the song is a snapshot of a moment filled with newness and promise — a promise since fulfilled. Sagan and Steiner wouldn’t have believed you in those days if you said they’d be making their lives and careers out of Ratboys. Hardly any full-time bands make it through four years of college and then another decade of basement gigs, gas-station lunches, interstate marathons and uncomfortable air mattresses. Passion for the music has kept them going, no matter the challenges they’ve faced. “We’re scrappy,” Steiner says. “We’ll do what we gotta do to stay alive.”
Mike Jordan Laskey is the communications director for the Jesuit Conference, where he hosts the AMDG podcast and runs the Jesuit Media Lab. He lives with his family in Maryland.