What defines D.C.? Is it the museums? The monuments? The Metro? Talking with City Paper over Zoom, local band Bacchae offer a less obvious and less auspicious answer.

“D.C. has one of the worst rat problems in the country,” says singer and keyboardist Katie McD. “Part of our experience of being from D.C. is that everybody’s had a rat run across their feet at some point when they’ve been taking out the trash or walking somewhere at night.” 

City Paper has been covering the issue for more than 20 years. In 2023, pest control company Orkin crowned D.C. the fourth most rat-infested city in the United States (only one rank below New York). But on one song from Bacchae’s forthcoming album, Next Time, the band take the rodents’ perspective. Their smirking dance-punk sing-along, “Just a Rat,” is dedicated to the idea that there’s nothing wrong with being vermin.

“We seek out midnight chaos/ We squeeze in hidden spaces/ Your laws can never change us/ We are poison,” McD chants in one verse. 

The song turns the plight of the rat into a potent metaphor for life on the margins of a human society that wants to exterminate you but can’t. It resonates with the dehumanization at work as legislators consider bills to strip rights from trans people across the country, and as officials force unhoused people out of encampments in D.C. Any way you read it, the highly shoutable one-line chorus “I am just a rat” comes out like an affirmation and a taunting threat.

“I don’t know exactly why we’ve been attracted to that kind of imagery, but there’s something fun about rats existing below the surface of the city, feeding on what other people leave behind, creeping in the cracks and corners,” says guitarist Andrew Breiner. “Maybe there’s something we identify with.”

Bacchae have been creeping in the shadows of the D.C. music scene since 2016. Three of the members—McD, Breiner, and drummer Eileen O’Grady—started playing music together as part of a friend’s Capital Fringe Festival show. Singer and bassist Rena Hagins joined after meeting Briener through Hat Band DC. Together, they settled into a strident post-punk sound reminiscent of Priests with a melodic sensibility and workaday charm they share with another local act, Bad Moves (who released their own celebration of Bacchae’s favored four-legged friends this April).

“We didn’t start out very polished, or, you know, ready at all,” says Breiner. “We’ve grown very publicly in the recordings we’ve released since then.”

Still, Bacchae’s scrappy early work got the attention of the queer artist-run independent label Get Better Records. After corresponding online and meeting the label’s founder, Alex Lichtenauer, at a D.C. house show, Bacchae released their self-titled EP through Get Better in 2018. The cassette edition was the first physical release that the band didn’t have to print with their own tape duplicator—or try to print, as the case often was with their self-released first album, Down the Drain. “Some of the tapes we duplicated may have been blank, so if you ever got a [blank Down the Drain] tape from us … we owe you a tape,” says Hagins, laughing. “Sorry.”

Technical difficulties aside, the early years shaped Bacchae’s current artistic identity. Before they settled on the illustrated lemon cross-section that adorns the cover of 2018’s EP, they considered an alternate design McD drew on a Post-it Note: a lemon, but with rats tearing into it. “Katie was like, ‘Well, one day I wanna do something with rats eating trash and being real dirty and gross,’” Hagins says. The concept went on to inspire merch, which, in part, inspired “Just a Rat.”

Scheduled to be released on July 5, Next Time finds Bacchae continuing to grow. It’s the band’s second album featuring the engineering and mixing talents of D.C. punk lifer J. Robbins, frontperson of Jawbox and producer for bands like Jawbreaker, the Dismemberment Plan, and Against Me! Songs such as the frantic, stop-and-start “Drop Dead Gorgeous” and the melancholy “New Jersey” build on Bacchae’s talents for sharp-toothed social commentary and reflective pop hook writing, respectively. But the new record also bears the weight of the four years since their second LP, Pleasure Vision, came out in March of 2020. As the title implies, Next Time is full of grief for the literal time the band lost to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I think we’ve all been going through it, and I think sometimes making the songs on the record was an outlet, and sometimes it seemed to exacerbate the spiraling,” says O’Grady about the band’s past four years. 

In the “hot and dusty” basement of the house Breiner and O’Grady share in Shaw, Bacchae spent the worst of the pandemic years sweating their way through writing sessions for the songs, which tackle many of the same day-to-day struggles that inspired the band’s previous work—struggles amplified by COVID. On the title track, it’s a face-off with anxiety. On the lead single, “Cooler Talk,” it’s the recurring grind of clocking in at work just to be exploited. Even past the peak of the pandemic, work has been a particularly sharp thorn in Bacchae’s side as their individual schedules, time-off allowances, and transitions to new jobs frustratingly impacted their ability to tour.

“I’m grateful to have income that’s not from music, because that’s even tougher,” says Breiner. “Obviously, some people are getting paid in the music industry, but they’re not musicians, for the most part.”

That’s true even in D.C., a city with a reputation—among its other, rattier distinctions—for caring about music. Creating art is not viable as a full-time source of income for most artists, and even where there is money, it often comes without the health insurance and benefits that other more typical careers provide. The band points to the DC Area Music Census, an initiative of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, as one reason to be optimistic. The anonymous survey aims to gather information to inform future policy decisions in support of the music community.

“But for the record,” McD cuts in, “nobody should have to have a job, you know?”

Take it from the toothy crunch of guitar and the scurry of hi-hat cymbals on “Just a Rat” and the rest of Next Time. Bacchae’s music speaks to the inherent value and dignity of all creatures, regardless of occupation—or number of legs.

“Nobody gets paid to exist. Since we are in this world, and we didn’t plan to be here, we have to just make ends meet and scrape by,” says Hagins. “Like rats.”

Next Time is available on July 5 via Get Better Records. Bacchae’s album release show starts at 8 p.m. on Aug. 9 at Songbyrd Music House.