'Gotta Be Cool' is the first single to be taken from the band's new album First Light, which is set for release this autumn through Pirates Press.
Hailing from Bruce Springsteen's hometown of Asbury Park, the Ratchets have little in common with The Boss other than a blue-collar bike-jacket-and-engineering-boot rock'n'roll heart. The band's debut album Glory Bound, released in 2006, was the first album to be released on Prates Press, but since then they've had a bit of a lay-off, making First Light the band's first full-length album in more than a decade.
"You have to have something new to say and you have to mean it otherwise to me there's a loss of credibility, and I'd rather keep my mouth shut than do that," says frontman Jed Engine, and you can't really say fairer than that.
"The Ratchets took some time off for a few years so I knew we had to write something really epic for the first session back. I think by the time we got to the studio we felt we were recording some really great tunes and the excitement
was there. We were lucky to record with our friend Pete Steinkopf, who is the guitarist from The Bouncing Souls, at his studio Little Eden in Asbury Park, NJ. It’s a familiar place to us — we used to practice there and wrote our LP Glory Bound there. He nailed our studio tones and that helped everything quickly fall
into place.
"'Gotta Be Cool' is about the nostalgia of looking back at your youth and the bond music forges between friends. When I wrote the song, I was thinking about what happens to those bonds as we grow older. Even though we may lose touch with friends we had as kids, the feelings behind those experiences don’t fade."
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