This week’s Audacy Alternative Pick of the Week is Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats with “Survivor.”
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About Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats:
It took Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats less than five years to become one of the most recognizable new forces in contemporary rock ’n’ roll. Since 2015, Rateliff has led his denim-clad, horn-flanked Night Sweats, supplying the zeal of a whiskey-chugging Pentecostal preacher to songs about this world’s shared woes. They’ve had hits, sure, but their combustible mix of soul and rock quickly cemented them as the rare generational band who balanced ecstatic live shows with engrossing and rich records. To wit, is there any other modern act capable of revving up stadium crowds for The Rolling Stones (and being asked by Bob Dylan to open two separate tours) before appearing on Saturday Night Live and CMT Crossroads and at NPR’s Tiny Desk in short order?
When Rateliff returned from his truncated solo tour in March 2020, he struggled with the same question that vexed so many of us then—what now? Using skills from his former gig as a gardener, he busied himself with home-improvement projects and slowly drifted back toward songwriting. The tunes that followed not only reflected the anxiety of the moment but also caused him to reconsider just what constituted a Night Sweats versus a Nathaniel Rateliff song. After two early sessions in late 2020, Rateliff still grappled with the existential question about what it meant to be his full self with his band. Rateliff reflected, “I look at it overall as a big question. When I was writing the record we were in the middle of a pandemic and our future looked pretty bleak. I just continue to try to write from a place of hope. Then my own neurosis, and maybe being a Libra gets in the way, and I can’t make up my mind. There is this constant back and forth battle in me personally and I am sure that comes out in my writing.”
Then he met producer Bradley Cook, previously responsible for records by Bon Iver, The War on Drugs, and Hiss Golden Messenger. Cook convinced Rateliff that the binary was false, that the distinction between solo and full-band material mattered less than the dozen songs he loved best. Cook was right: After a two-week whirlwind of recording and mixing at Rateliff’s home studio, the Night Sweats emerged with The Future largely finished, stunned by their own evolution and their ability to unify innate magnetism and burgeoning sophistication.
Each of these songs testifies to this sudden growth. A vulnerable reckoning with the exigencies of a full life, “Survivor” talks back with defiance, its squawking horns and shouted hook shrugging off a weight of the world that “continues to grow until it finally buries you.”
During these last two daunting years, with so many facets of our daily lives put on indefinite hold, we’ve had the rare opportunity to take stock of where we have been, where we are, and where we might be going. Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats plundered this paradoxical silver lining not only to realize they could become more but also to actualize it.
“Is the future open? / Is the future seen?” Rateliff asks with the first lines of the album’s opening title track, mining the dual senses of worry and wonder that have framed much of our recent past. For so long, the future of Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats seemed settled and seen—a marquee soul-rock band that always had the best time. But The Future presents something more sustainable, interesting, and indeed open—a songwriter and band growing into bigger questions and sounds, into a future that allows them to remain recognizable but be so much more compelling than some denim-clad caricature.
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