Is The Walkmen’s ‘The Rat’ the greatest drum song of the 21st century?
The drummer tends to have both the best and the worst job in any rock band. Getting able to let loose on a set may be the easiest thing in the world to do for most drummers, but being able to keep time coherently, as well as make songs that will keep people coming back for more, is an art. While drum heroes might be hard to come by most of the time, Matt Barrick of The Walkmen made a case for the greatest drum performance of the century on ‘The Rat’.
If you were to look at the band without the drum track, though, it would seem like the same kind of garage-adjacent that was coming out of most rock bands around this time. Listening to the band’s album Bows + Arrows, it’s easy to hear them pulling from everyone from The Strokes to even the shades of Britpop that actually liked to kick out the jams every once in a while.
Once you put Barrick behind the drumkit, he practically turned the song into a punk rager from the ground up. All the makings of a decent pop-rock track are there, but it’s strange to think that one of the biggest elements of the song that makes it a punk staple is actually far closer to disco than it is to rock and roll.
Before any rock purists get their fingers ready to discount yours truly, there were a lot of great aspects of disco. Outside of the glitzy production, there were also many different sonic textures being made by the likes of Nile Rodgers, including the now signature hi-hat that kept the groove going throughout many classic 1970s pop songs.
If the disco hi-hat was about keeping a groove going, Barrick takes the sound and kicks it up to around twice its speed. Compared to the other auteurs that were teaching drum clinics like Dave Grohl did on Queens of the Stone Age’s ‘No One Knows’, ‘The Rat’ is pure muscle throughout its runtime, as if Barrick’s drums said something nasty about his family and he’s coming to exact revenge.
That anger may not have been by accident, either. When working with producer Dave Sardy, the band said they had more than a few problems in the studio, claiming, “Dave was a hot shot record producer guy, and we didn’t really hit it off. We were pretty difficult, and he was being pretty difficult, and it ended pretty badly…He did a fantastic job, but it was pretty heated”.
Then again, maybe that kind of tension added to the drums being as frantic as they were. Before the track even begins with the drums, Barrick’s count-in feels calm before the storm before he gets moving, making the rest of the band sound like they are doing a serviceable job at best next to him.
While the garage-rock revival genre was still in its prime in 2004, there were more than a few drummers that would carry on that kind of intensity in the next few years. The entire basis of the song is practically a warm-up for what Arctic Monkeys would do later when putting together ‘Brianstorm’ for Favourite Worst Nightmare, and chances are Matt Tong of Bloc Party took the basis of this song into every other project he’s worked on since.
Now that many bands have ditched the traditional drums for various plug-ins and drum machines, ‘The Rat’ still stands as one of the greatest performances that anyone has made behind the kit since 2000. You can try to emulate that kind of style with as many machines as you want to, but the passion behind playing like this only comes from someone who’s annihilating the kit like their lives depend on it.
