Forgive Julia Steiner if she’s been a little nervous or scanning her phone for new global catastrophes in recent weeks.

Steiner, who sings and plays guitar, spoke recently as her Chicago-based indie band Ratboys was getting ready to embark upon their first headline tour. Ratboys were supposed to go on their first headline tour, in support of their critically acclaimed “Printer’s Devil” album, in March 2020 — right before the covid-19 pandemic shut that down.

This time, Ratboys will be touring on the strength of their latest album, “The Window,” which already has received strong reviews from Pitchfork, Paste Magazine and Stereogum, among others. That tour hits Bottlerocket Social Hall in Pittsburgh’s Allentown neighborhood for a show on Oct. 2 with support from Free Range.

“One of the best parts of making music is getting to share it with everyone and it truly isn’t ours anymore, which is really exciting,” Steiner said from Chicago. “It truly feels like we’re sharing it so I appreciate that. It feels great.”

The title track might not exist without the context of the pandemic era.

“It basically revolves around this conversation that my grandparents had — really my grandpa talking to my grandma — kind of saying a final goodbye through an open window of the nursing home where my grandma was living shortly before she passed away,” Steiner said. “It was one of those really odd and surreal things where you find a workaround of the rules to still maintain this connection even though it’s interrupted in some way, in some strange way. … It was such an oddly beautiful, very striking image. And obviously I love my grandparents and wanted to remember this moment or try to capture it because I wasn’t there to experience it in person.

“I wanted to try to put myself there spiritually in some sort of way. The song just happened really naturally, and I’m thankful that it exists because a lot of people have related to it in one way or another, so that’s very comforting, too.”

Steiner said the song is about her maternal grandparents, who moved from Pittsburgh to Dayton, Ohio, when her mother was born in the 1960s.

“I think it’s really healthy to process loss and grief with other people. I find that to be very, I just feel less alone. And being able to talk about death openly is kind of a comfort in many ways, which might seem backwards or something,” she said. “It immediately felt like the most natural thing to do to try to process it in this way for me so I’m glad it brings some joy or comfort to other people and it isn’t too sad.”

Despite living in Chicago for years, Steiner remains a Steelers fan because of her grandfather.

“My grandpa’s an OG. He grew up in Pittsburgh and lived there till he had my mom, so he brainwashed me at a young age to be a Steelers fan. … It worked out great for me,” she said. “They won the Super Bowl right when I was starting to pay attention, so it was great timing.”

Although some of the songs on “The Window” actually predate the pandemic, the band used the unexpected downtime to focus on the music. At the time, Steiner lived in a single-family house with guitarist David Sagan, who started the band with Steiner back in 2010, and bassist Sean Neumann, which led to changes in crafting the album.

“It was definitely different in the sense that we just had so much time to really put our heads together and work on songs, get to know them a little bit more. The process of writing the songs started in a similar way, where it’s just me and a guitar kind of coming up with some ideas or like the bones of a song and the lyrics and things like that,” Steiner said. “Then I would bring that to the band instead of in the past I would just bring it to Dave, who plays guitar. We started the band, just the two of us back in the day. Now kind of skipping that step of just bringing it to him and then working on it as a two-piece and finding friends to play on songs, now we had a whole cohesive unit to start working on the songs from scratch rather than just building up to that point later.”

Another change was recording live to tape, working with producer Chris Walla (best known for his time in Death Cab for Cutie).

“Just having the amount of time we did to rehearse the songs not just one at a time, but we were in the room playing them twice a week for a year or whatever, really two years,” Steiner said. “We just were ready to go as a live band when we went into the studio, so it was cool to capture that energy, and I think we’re going to keep going down that path. It’s pretty fun.”

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Ratboys debuted a few new songs on tour last year — like “The Window” and “It’s Alive — “but no one really knew them,” Steiner said. Outside of an album release show a few weeks ago in Chicago, most haven’t been performed live yet.

“So it’s exciting to play those songs now that they’re out and people have a little bit more of a relationship with them,” she said.

Steiner said there are some songs that translate really well to playing live, like “Black Earth, WI,” an epic eight-minute track that’s the longest song of their career.

“That’s really fun because it’s kind of different every night. Dave plays a long guitar solo, and it’s never the same twice, so that’s always really fun,” Steiner said. “There’s a song on the record called ‘Empty’ that I really love playing. It’s like really loud and (expletive) very brash.

“I really like playing that one because it feels like we can play as loud as we want. Hopefully people will enjoy that, and it’s not just me. We’ll see.”

Besides the new album, Ratboys will be touring in a new-to-them van after years of using a Toyota Sequoia SUV with a trailer. (Steiner was particularly excited about the Bluetooth radio and not having to keep track of so many dongles.) But with the change in vehicles comes new challenges like late-night meals.

“It’s nice not having the trailer to worry about parallel parking and things like that,” Steiner said. “We can be a little more flexible with that. But at the same time, the van is kind of tall, so I don’t know if we’ll be able to go through the Taco Bell drive-thru.”

By Steiner’s count, Ratboys are on their 10th drummer (based on people who have played/toured with them outside of Chicago), and she couldn’t be happier with Marcus Nuccio’s tenure with the band.

“God, not that we’re the most difficult people to get along with, I hope not, you know what I mean?” Steiner said. “People have lives. As we get older, people want to get jobs, people want to settle down; you gotta respect that.”

With all of the drummer changes, there haven’t been any mysterious gardening accidents or unexplained phenomena a la Spinal Tap.

“No spontaneous combustion, no puff of green smoke turning into a pebble on the drum stool. None of that. Not yet,” Steiner joked. “Marcus is aware of the risks though; he’s very brave.”

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