Rats In The Gutter

Welcome back to the gutter where the living ain’t easy and the joys of scraping by are . . . well, few and far between. But like, ‘community’. And like, ‘therapy’. Because while everything is on fire you can at least anaesthetise with self-care and yet another instalment of whatever the Kardashians are up to these days (*vomit sound). On the Kardashians, the rats revisit Kanye’s public apology for...

Here we are in the new year, and any hopes of an improvement over the cluster fuck of 2025 are well and truly shot to shit. Because apparently we’re all expendable when it comes to the resource grabs of sycophantic billionaires. Bleating sheep marching obediently to the slaughter (sooooo brat summer). And yet the world is still so full of wonder. Like pussy sponges, an ancient solution to the age-...

Wow, what a year this week has been! Just when you think the stink of western madness couldn’t get thicker on the air…it does. But anyone living on this side of 9/11 knows already that it can always get worse; and just in time for Christmas! One of our favourite things to do over the Christmas period is spiral in the family home after declining to join your loved ones at lunch, only to pull back f...

The rats are in mourning this week as Jimmy D, perhaps NZ’s last source of spiritually consistent urban gothic, closes its doors. As longtime fans of death-eater adjacent hotness, we feel the loss, and pity New Zealanders who wouldn’t bat an eye, and who clearly never grew up with the kinds of adolescent anti-social malcontent that leads later in life to success in the arts. In memoriam, we list o...

It is officially Wicked Season and if you’re not a shrill femme jumping on the Ozian Express and getting your landing strip dyed a pleasing shade of verdigris, are you even ALIVE??!! Arguably, as our producer has pointed out, the true cinema of Wicked is the press tour, and by golly if Cynthia and Ariana haven’t ratcheted up the lezzy-platonic-whatever-it-is thing that they have going on like a di...

There’s something rotten in the South Pacific (it’s cops, we’re talking about cops). Recent salacious pedo-adjacent revelations in NZ’s law enforcement aside, there is just SO MUCH to cover here at the end of everything, and the rats feel so honoured to have an avid listenership to join them in bearing witness to the rising seas (and everything that comes with that). Firstly, Auckland’s hornet pro...

WARNING—contains a full minute of dead air as Johanna leaves the studio for a spew. A prerequisite of living in the gutter is humility—which, this week, Sam and Johanna seem to be in short supply of. Maybe we can blame the fact that narcissistic personality types are the new normal, or maybe it’s a contagion spread to us by our affluent gay friends who are more white and liberal than a Jacinda Ard...

Get ready non-paying listeners (cough; no shade) for a very special and hopefully consistent-hereafter Agony Aunt section in which we answer your queries qualms and primal screams. Well, we do our best. As we see you have; your responses to our calls for willing plaintiffs has been voluminous and shrill (a compliment). And how can we blame you—life feels like a succession of vertigo-inducing obsta...

Hello there, our beloved and non paying listeners. This week the rats weave and wend their way around a world teetering on total shit fuckery (some would say we’re already there, or have been ever since the Iron Lady mainstreamed pillaging public infrastructure for the benefit of a ruling elite; tomay-toe toma-toe). In the rat’s shared world, which is still shared despite being separated by the Ta...

Everything is faaaaaaaarked. And yet, the rats are here. Picking the carcass of the west for views and likes. This week, Winnie Peters is a big brown anti christ! Doxing is not all good, but self-hating brownies who live in glass houses (or the beehive) should NOT throw stones (cough cough lol). Also, Taylor versus Charli. Taylor McSwift made a serious blunder when she came for the people’s prince...

Another day, another National bequeathed nightmare. And yet more fixation on the unbearable incompetence of Nicola Willis. I know I know blaming a single person for the ruinous policies of an entire party is a bias, and in this particular instance borderline misogyny. But at this point we’re kinda not feeling beholden to considering the feelings of our shit-brained self-interested bloated-bellied...

This week, Melbourne vs Auckland. Which is better? Just kidding; it;’s obviously Melbourne. And yet the rats, being measured journalists, provide a balanced review of both locales, two places that are so different but also so similar; like their resemblance in local cuisine (meth). Or the casual and continued usurpation of the indigenous! With that in mind Johanna is settling in well, having just...

well well well the rats are back and despite their hiatus they are NOT feeling rested. If anything their personal lives reflect the disarray of global politics. Though if they had to pick a favourite cluster fuck from the last week, it would definitely be the Nepalese uprising of angry zoomers literally burning their government to the ground for kicking them off twitter. In that vein, the rats wou...

What a time to be alive! The states are stating, the gulags are gulaging, and the labubu continues to rise as a new synthetic super power with total fractal. Domination of the collective human psyche in its sights. But what of toy-crazes of yesteryear? Such as, the Sea Monkey. Revisiting Johanna’s private shame this week, we reminisce about an earlier episode in which she confesses (is found out,...

What a world we’re living in! They say god is dead but the rats know our One True Lord and Saviour is convenience, a modus operandi that’s convenient to some and kind of a bum deal to others depending on which side your bread’s buttered on; (Global) North or South. And so, the rats spend some time swapping misadventures on Uber Pool that’s equal parts sympathetic to the plight of neo slavery (whic...

Guests! Give a very warm welcome to our very special guests actor Matt Whelan and writer/actor Sophie Henderson, two of NZ’s finest film and television talents whose recent film Workmates just premiered at the NZIFF to acclaim and accolades and the kind of national pride our government should be aspiring to, rather than allying itself closer to a genocidal behemoth by letting them build an intelli...

Like they’ve never done before (cough) the rats talk about democracy’s failings and how its formal and informal elements need to be kept distinct enough we have a functioning society, which anyone with a semi-functioning only marginally divergent brain can see we currently don’t have (or worse, are in the agony stages of losing permanently; use it or lose it!). but on a lighter note . . . eugenics...

The clubs that raised us! The rats get nostalgic about a time when all venues were open til six AM, where supper clubs could serve you a pre-work night cap at eight, and the shame flowed as thick and hot as mid morning vodka red bulls. It’s a time that seems comparatively free and footloose, where the youths of today wouldn’t hit the club without checking their weekly schedule for important obliga...

Okay, so the Katy Perry abuse might’ve crossed over into primal woman-hate; on a local scale we mean. Like, it’s overkill at this point. In this being the rats dissect where the admittedly gleeful train of celebrity hate might accidentally be a mouthpiece for systemic misogyny; or worse, a cultural loathing of brunettes. And what vivisection of the bittersweet phenom known as Katy Perry would be c...

For some reason, or perhaps because a show about surviving late-stage capitalism with your friends and sanity intact is relevant now, the rats revisit some ancient Buffy lore. Or perhaps it’s because a show about the undead resonates with recent national conversations (in actual mainstream media) about resurrecting the moa, or the kiwi when it’s finally extinct; because apparently conservation is...

Twinks; what even are they? This is just one of many hard hitting questions the rats tackle in this week’s free to air (fuckin freeloaders) episode. They don’t come to a conclusion mostly because doing so is grossly homophobic (or do they?). Also on the agenda is whether or not David Seymour should unalive himself which, as always, the rats are pretty strongly in favour of, if only because he repr...

SORRY FOLKS - this ep is coming out about a week late due to a technical error If the rising seas don’t vanish Venice then surely Jeff Bezos’ repugnantly lavish wedding and its vile attendees will sink it faster than nineties-sized Oprah on a boogie board. So hypothesise the rats. Also, Lorde’s Virgin is finally here and so the rats share their initial impressions, and relief that Ella’s stepped a...

This ep is proudly sponsored by One Percent Collective: opc.nz/RATS Reality bends, warps, is vulnerable to liberal edits by every twelve year old with an iPhone, and is the worse off for it. That’s what we’re dealing with, collective sanity taking an extended sabbatical. And that’s the exact tone the rats take with its free-to-you ep this week, a shame-free fact-free spiral down various rabbit hol...

The rats have contracted a mental illness whereby they can’t stop name dropping. Symptoms include swapping stories about famous people who may or may not hate them. Also, seasonal depression is getting mixed up with the existential dread of democracy’s very violent and drawn out end, which the rats have various strategies for combatting; like keto friendly sweet treats courtesy of local brand Just...

There seems to be a lot of negative chat re Sabrina Carpenter’s new album cover, and while at least one of the rats thinks Sabrina is the pop world’s most beige offering since Missy Higgins, they both agree that women policing women isn’t on; unless it’s a grown woman advising another grown woman to keep her love of Taylor Swift on the d-low (because like every conservative grifter with a secret G...