Rat Sauce Burned the Damn House Down: A Field Report from the Front Lines of Punk’s Revival

Bordentown, New Jersey. Not exactly the epicenter of anything but Wawa runs and sun-bleached nostalgia. But tonight, in the fluorescent-lit bowels of Bordentown High School — yes, a goddamn high school auditorium with a functioning PA — something is happening. Something violent and ecstatic and real. The kind of thing you don’t plan on but walk away from changed. A band takes the stage and it doesn’t feel like a performance. It feels like a possession.

The band is Rat Sauce. Female-fronted, Jersey-bred, and loud enough to blast the rust off your bones. They don’t take the stage. They seize it. There’s an undeniable presence here — something too alive to be dismissed, too chaotic to be calculated. Every member operates like they’ve got something to prove, but not in the insecure, try-hard way. More like: “We’ve already won, and now we’re just setting fire to the place for kicks.”

Let’s talk about the guitarist first, Matt Tomaszewski, because holy hell. From the second he steps onstage, it’s clear he’s not here to blend in. He’s here to burn it down. He doesn’t just hit chords. He obliterates them, tearing through strings with a kind of glittering violence. Like a blender full of broken glass and feedback. Think Mick Ronson raised on horror movies and cheap ramen. He absolutely rips.

The drummer? Zolie Erdos. Picture a feral dog let loose in a kitchen cabinet during a thunderstorm. That’s the style. Total percussive anarchy, but in the best way. Absolute fury. Every crash sounds like a car wreck you can’t look away from. It’s primal, and it works because it’s not pretending to be anything else. It’s what punk is supposed to sound like — impolite and unstoppable.

Then there’s the bassist, Ben Sexton. Jesus Christ. He bleeds cool from his fingers. Whole vibe like he walked out of a Lou Reed fever dream. Doesn’t just hold down the low end. He owns it. And he moves. This isn’t one of those bands where the bassist sways politely and tries not to unplug himself. No. This guy’s a live wire. Animated, sweating, snarling. Even when he’s in the pocket, he’s pushing at the seams. By the time they hit their stride mid-set, he’s front and center, right hand a blur, like a hummingbird overdosing on espresso.

And the singer, Mia Coppola. Fuck. When she speaks, she sounds like a young Judy Garland — charming, vulnerable, somewhere between a dream and a breakdown. But when she sings? It’s not Judy anymore. It’s Judy being dragged through an alley and resurrected. She’s got Garland by the throat, squeezing out the ghost of every note with raw emotion. No affectation. No hiding behind reverb or irony. Just this voice that could break glass and then soothe the shards back together.

Every song is a blur of sound and movement. No one — no one — stays still. The whole band’s in motion the entire time, like they’ve been shocked awake by some divine electrical current. It’s not just performance. It’s possession.

And then they rip into “United States of Whatever.” You know the one. Liam Lynch, 2000. Bratty, bizarre, beautiful. I didn’t expect it. I didn’t want it. But goddamn if they didn’t turn it into something transcendent. A snarling, twitching, stuttering version that felt like it had been passed through a meat grinder and come out stronger. The pause before the last chorus stretched just long enough to make my spine tingle. I swear I could hear the whole room inhale at once. Suspense, timing, chaos — all converging on that moment like it mattered. And when they brought it back in? It hit harder than it ever had. Like the song was reborn for a generation that’s more fried, more fractured, and more ready to scream than ever.

They closed with a new one. Unreleased. No name, no warning, just fury. A total clinic in punk combustion. Ben was out front again, right hand a goddamn blur, and Matt was so high up the fretboard, dogs in the next zip code started howling. Zolie and Mia locked in, heartbeat and breath in perfect sync. It was chaos married to control, and it hit like a bottle rocket to the face.

Rat Sauce isn’t interested in playing it safe. They don’t give a shit about polish or polishers. They’re not posturing or pleading. They’re just doing it. Making the kind of noise that makes you believe in live music again. Not as a spectacle, but as a need. As something vital, immediate, and sweaty as hell.

Tonight wasn’t about nostalgia. It wasn’t about a scene or a look or a fucking brand. It was about the way your pulse changes when music grabs you by the gut. It was about a band that isn’t waiting to be discovered. They’re happening, now, whether you’re paying attention or not.

And if you are paying attention? You might just walk away with a new favorite band.

I did.