Castle Rat are back to fulfill all of your medieval fantasies with a new chapter in their fantastical lore. “The Bestiary finds Castle Rat entrusted with a Book of Beasts bestowed upon us by a great and powerful Wizard,” high priestess and frontwoman Riley Pinkerton (AKA Rat Queen) states. “We are on a mission to protect the book—a sacred text capable of summoning mythic beasts—from our relentless arch nemeses, Death, Herself—The Rat Reaperess.” The album’s songs are designed to be a “cyclical path … to summon the beasts, and an ode to the mysticism imparted upon us by The Wizard.”
Castle Rat, led by Pinkerton, along with the Count (Franco Vittore) on guitar, the Plague Doctor (Ronnie Lanzilotta) on bass, and the All Seeing Druid (Joshua Strmic) on drums, is set to drop the The Bestiary on Sept 19 as a cross Atlantic joint release with King Volume Records and the U.K.’s Blues Funeral Recordings. The album is a departure from their previous work, with a more collaborative and immersive writing and recording process.
“We wrote The Bestiary as a group, which was new for us,” Pinkerton explains. “I would bring in song ideas or basic song structures and lyrics and we’d work on arranging them together. Franco wrote a song, Charley wrote a song.”
This collective energy was captured in Woodstock, NY, at Applehead, a studio Pinkerton describes as a “beautiful studio and setting. We’d wake up every day at the studio and have breakfast and walk around the snowy creek and then record all day. It was really immersive and intense.”
The band’s strong, empowered femme presence is a key element of their identity. Pinkerton emphasizes their goal is to provide a world for listeners to enter.
“It’s important for us to give people a world to step into outside of their own,” she says. “If having a strong female presence makes people happy, then that’s great. We want people to feel the world building and experience the details and ideas. What ‘The Realm’ is and how people experience it is something we’re always thinking about.”
With the release of the new album, Castle Rat are also debuting a new live show. Pinkerton is excited for fans to experience it, noting that there’s “considerably more action and music and drama than in our previous show.” Some of the new tracks have already been tested on audiences with great success. “We’ve been performing a few new songs live,” she shares, mentioning that “‘Wizard’ is always exciting to play. There’s a thrashy unreleased song called ‘Siren’ that crowds have been really responding to.” As for what comes next, Pinkerton is keeping a lid on any future projects. “You’ll just have to re-enter The Realm and experience it yourself,” she teases.
The Bestiary is out tomorrow on King Volume Records and Blues Funeral Recordings, and you can preorder it here. Follow Castle Rat on Instagram for future updates.