Rats In The Gutter

Happy Fourth of July! Just kidding. There’s no way either rat would ever attach positive affect to a day celebrating the most obnoxious landmass this side of Pangea (and wasn’t SHE a bitch). But the rats WILL settle for shitting on its golden child Taylor Swift whose wedding, despite being a BIG SECRET, we can practically remote-view with full accuracy for the Shein-flavoured polyester nightmare t...

Holy mackerel, what the effing eff is wrong with this country? Referring of course to the vermin issue NZ is currently facing. The vermin in question? Not your usual bright eyed fluffy tailed hosts, but one neoconservative Christian asshole, a reverend (is he?) B. Tamaki whose recent vitriol—a literal call to exterminate immigrants/muslims—is being met with the kind of infuriating lassez faire tha...

Well holly friggin moly if the apocalypse train hasn’t already left the station, which it has, and gosh darn it don’t we have whip lash. And to think, we’re BARELY into phase one of the reptilian terraforming procedure, and the rats already feel like calling parley with the overlords; if only because the high cortisol environment of collapse is actually very bad for gut health (and everything else...

This week, Johanna describes the best live performance she’s ever seen in her life—which is saying something, as a seasoned performer herself, and someone very much in the world. It’s a piece called A Year Without Summer by a recently internet-famous artist, thanks to a performance at the Venice Biennial in which she played a human dongle inside a giant bell (and so, The Bell Woman). Summer takes...

Well, as winter descends and New Zealanders retreat into Bronte flavoured gothic doldrums, some turn to the familiar for comfort, the known, the whimsical. And for the rats, this can sometimes mean indulging in a slightly embarrassing but mostly innocuous nostalgia watch of Adventure Time, which should actually have its roses as a forward-thinking animation that still smacks of post-modern vitalit...

Jesus H Christ is it a crime to be messy these days or what? Seriously, the optimisation metrics, this ideology of converting every micro-event into revenue is becoming very effing suffocating. Like seriously, is there no inch on god’s green (ish) earth safe from the parasitic reach of The Economic Incentive? In this vacuum packed cat suit of a social climate the rats wonder about the true value o...

In honour of Tāmaki Noir tonight being hosted by Emma and featuring Samuel here's an episode from the back catalogue. a refined and amiable guest - this week we talk to journalist Emma Gleason about life, love, and the dystopian abolishment of truth in a media landscape that has no center. Delve into our back catalogue, bonus episodes and video content at patreon.com/RatsInTheGutter Hosted on Acas...

A flashback to when Chris Parker and Eli Matthewson joined forces with Rats In The Gutter’s Johanna Cosgrove and Samuel Te Kani. This special one-off live event, we tempt the lawyers by covering modern Pride, recent break ups and gay All Blacks. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

RERUN: The Rats are taking a much deserved recording break, please enjoy this episode from the back catalogue. In this introductory episode, Samuel and Johanna explore their many indulgences toeing the line between self-care and self-harm, including (among other things) sex toys, weak white men, drinking as a national sport, smoking, full blown Burger King addiction and clinical inter-dependency....

This week the rats acknowledge that they’ve had something of a hiatus, without offering apology. The world is coo coo crazy right now and if the most charismatic gutter-creatures in the southern hemisphere (ask anyone) feel like taking a break, then they’ll damn well do so, without seeking approval first. That’s how rats and narcoleptics roll. First up, the rats tackle the current feud between Sky...

The body keeps the score, and this week the rat-bodies are bedraggled, bewitched, bewigged, and decidedly simian. Which is to say, despite recent salmonella attacks (taking out both towers) the rats are present and ready to tour anyone who’ll listen through the jumble-bin of a week-in-review. Which includes; an objectively stellar idea for a dive bar named Throbs and Leaks which, having a backroom...

The spiral continues! Though getting out of bed at the moment feels like the effort equivalent of pulling wooden splinters out of your own sphincter, the rats (along with billions of other misguided humans on this planet) are doing it anyway—and how! Despite our Sisyphean misgivings about being alive, this week the chats are as torrid and torrential as ever, starting off strong with a query; if th...

This week the rats are cinephiles and snap review The Moment, which they were lucky enough to see an advance screening of at Avondale’s illustrious Hollywood Theatre. The verdict? A not quite scathing enough meta-comedy about the cultural death of mass entertainment, and the slaughter a certain level of fame does to an artist’s integrity, when they’re willing to make potentially damning compromise...

So many things to be disappointed by, so little time. At the top of the list this week is Gaga’s murky position on Israel, because we think the lady doth NOT protest as much as she could be protesting. Being an ally of white gays is a serviceable pass up to a point, and that point is most definitely conspicuous silence on a very visible genocide lol. Another visceral disappointment in this wicked...

Soooooooo everything’s totally cool and normal right now aye, like definitely so chill that anxiously masculine influencers are looksmaxing which is another way of saying trying to look even more European than they already do, making mogging and the like a kid-friendly introduction to eugenics and nazi aesthetics, which probably has absolutely nothing to do with a male loneliness epidemic engineer...

Oh dear, it looks like we’ve been so desensitized to horror that full disclosure doesn’t mean diddly (doesn’t mean DIDDY) any more. Like, what even is happening with the Epstein Files? The rats don’t personally go in for annual bingo cards because they’re adults and not dead-eyed youths reducing every uncomfortable aspect of life to a game or meme trope, but that said, if either rat had a bingo ca...

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...