When U Were Mine
There is a familiar tension running through Ratfink!’s “When U Were Mine”, a sense that you have heard something like this before while also knowing that it refuses to settle into any recognisable category. The record plays with understatement as a form of provocation. Ratfink@ repeatedly downplays what he is doing, describing the songs as psychedelic nonsense or leaning hard into the mythology of lo-fi limitation, yet that self-effacement feels deliberate rather than defensive. It is not an apology for rough edges but a way of redirecting attention away from polish and towards intent. In a moment where DIY is often aestheticised into another brand language, “When U Were Mine” insists that informality can still be an ethic rather than a look. The stories around its making are almost aggressively anti-mythical: a cheap mic, a battered guitar, a laptop damaged by beer and repurposed as character rather than failure. But the point is not romance. What emerges instead is a quiet argument about authorship and scale. Ratfink!’s songs do not chase significance through volume or spectacle. They sit with small gestures, casual humour and emotional slack, trusting that meaning accumulates when nothing is over-explained. This approach feels increasingly rare. As platforms reward clarity, branding and instant legibility, “When U Were Mine” leans into vagueness as resistance. The earlier singles hinted at this, but across the album, it becomes structural. Nothing is fully nailed down, and that looseness reads as confidence rather than indecision. It recalls a time when DIY music was less about signalling independence and more about simply making work under imperfect conditions, then standing by it.