The Ratskin Family Band are the world’s first and only drag country band, and they’re from Toronto! For decades, country and western fans have been begging for an all-drag-queen, -king, and -thing band. The Ratskin Family Band is an answer to these prayers, performing country standards, reimagined pop hits, and original country songs with queer themes. At most drag shows, performers are lip syncing for their lives, but this is not your typical drag show, as each member performs live either playing instruments, singing, or both!

Read on to find out details on a couple of local Toronto performances happening, including their EP release party, as well as an exclusive interview with theBUZZ below.

This all-drag country band performs country standards, reimagined pop hits and original country songs with queer themes. Join Amanda Prior (banjo), Kitty Creature (fiddle), Terry Dickoff (bass), Zephline (acoustic guitar), Pinny Merle (pedal steel), and Tago Mago (percussion) for a hootenanny queer country fusion band the likes of which cannot be experienced anywhere else on the planet.

They’ve been performing since April 2024, and this DIY “yallternative” act has built a strong following here in Toronto that continues to grow with each show. Theyve also taken the show on the road to Ottawa, Montreal, and a few other stops. Their new EP, Back to the Cuntry (featuring the newly released single “All You Fascists Bound to Lose”) is an electrifying energetic encapsulation of their live shows, in a tight 35 minute studio performance.

‘Back to the Cuntry’ was recorded live off the floor (some songs in only one take), to capture the magic and energy of the live shows the band has become known for. Live performance is what The Ratskin Family Band does, and the recorded music reflects that. The project begins with the song they start every show with, “Will the Circle be Unbroken” a traditional country hymn where each member sings a verse, and ends with the song they close out every show with, “All You Fascists (Bound to Lose)”. In between are tales of seduction, murder, devotion and freedom written by the bandmates themselves. ‘Back to the Cuntry’ takes the heart of country music: storytelling, and uses it to shine light on niche facets of queer Canadian life both rural and urban.

This project brings queer stories (real and imagined) to the forefront of a genre that has always been camp, but rarely loving to 2SLGBTQ folks, until recently. The Ratskin’s  aim to reunite queer people raised on country music with a warm hug and an album that loves them back, while also creating a space for people who may have never felt safe to engage with country music.

The band generously received a grant from The Awesome Foundation that will help the band in paying other Toronto artists/costume designers/cinematographers, etc which will also help strengthen the visual world that accompanies the music: music videos, show photography, and promotional photoshoots. As a drag country band, you have to see them in action to get the full picture!

Meet The Rats

Back to the Cuntry EP Release Party – Friday Sept 25, 2026 – Doors at 7:30pm, Show at 8:00pm

Drom Taberna, 458 Queen Street W, Toronto Tickets are $15 in advance, and $20 at the door.

CD Copies of ‘Back to the Cuntry’ will be available with Milkshook at the merch booth, along with stickers, buttons, t shirts, bandanas and collectible trading card packs. (Cash, Card & Etransfer accepted). Listen Here

Bring your chosen family, queer friends, and all the glam you can find to honour the life of American Saint Dolly Parton as the band will be honouring her life and legacy in addition to the EP release show.

The band will also be performing on November 7 2026 at The Pilot, with Mother of X Ensh!

Joining these cuntry critters this evening is Toronto’s very own majestic alternative synth pop duo Mother of X Ensh. Known for their outspoken activism, heavy beats and anthemic melodies, this electropop doomer duo has been performing alongside The Ratskin Family Band since the very beginning, and is delighted to be sharing the stage with their hillbilly sisters once again! Prepare to dance, scream and let it all out on the dancefloor.

Saturday Nov 7, 2026 – Doors at 7:30pm, Show at 8:00pm

The Pilot – 22 Cumberland Street, Toronto – Tickets

theBUZZ chatted with Amanda Prior to dig a bit deeper into the minds of these Rats-cals

How did the inspiration for the band come about?

I think Drag and Country Music are so synonymous to me. I’m not sure if that’s because I’ve been doing this for a while or if it’s a result of being a little gay child in a home that listened to a lot of Country Music, but it’s inseperable to me. If you know what to look for you just kind of see it all as drag. On one hand you have the big hair, flashy Nudie’s suits and rhinestones of the 1970s, and today you have the almost caricature-esque portrayal of gender roles both lyrically and aesthetically. All of that is drag, it’s a kind of exaggerated gender performance. That’s not to say it isn’t authentic or that we’re making a mockery of the genre. It’s actually quite the opposite, all of us grew up on the music we’re playing right now, with family all over the rural country. We all have such a deep reverence and respect for this music and feel truly honored that we get to represent it in this way. We love it and care about it too much to ever want to disrespect such a beautiful rich tradition. A tradition that to us, has always included some aspect of Drag as we know it. Dolly Parton always comes to mind, the greatest Country Musician of all time is a Drag Queen. Long story long that’s kind of how we all came together, through this deep shared love of Country Music and this understanding that the only way for us to make it authentic (a key pillar of the genre) was to make it 100% as our full selves with zero compromise. We are as equally Country Musicians as we are Drag Queens, and to sacrifice one for the other would be unthinkable, and frankly disingenuine

Which came first for each individual, drag entertainer or musican?

That’s a tough question! It’s a mixed bag of chicken or the egg to be honest. Our fiddler is a classically trained violinist, but she was known to all of us as a fixture in Toronto’s alternative Drag scene. None of us knew she played the fiddle because she hadn’t picked it up it in almost a decade, but once she did, it was like she never left. It’s a lot of that. Our guitarist Zephline wasn’t a working professional Drag Queen per se when we met her, but she had been practicing drag makeup at home between painting and writing songs. Amanda Prior, our Banjo picker started walking balls in drag and lip syncing in bars as a teenager. But she’d retired from her infamous 4 year drag career when she became of age, and was performing out of drag at singer-songwriter gigs when she and Jelly got to forming the band. I think everyone kind of came to The Ratskin Family Band at a very pivotal fork in the road of their lives, and boy did we ever turn that fork into a spoon.

Where does inspiration for the songs come from, and who are the main writers?

We want to make authentic Country Music. I think a lot of Queer Country Musicians can relate to this feeling of wanting to make the most unambiguous-ly “Real Country” music possible out of this fear of being rejected from the genre. It isn’t like we want to necessarily fit into the mold of what modern top 40 Country is or anything, but more that we don’t want “oh they’re just calling themselves a country band for cultural points but that’s not *really* country” to be used against us. A lot of times that kind of argument gets used as a dismissal to exclude certain people from participating in the genre, the goal post gets moved and the definition becomes narrower. We saw this with Beyoncé a few years ago, we see Orville Peck get classified as “Alternative Indie”. Anyone who doesn’t belong, and dares to experiment within the genre is immediately disqualified. Not that we care too much about being accepted or anything and I do think we’re doing something new and interesting with the music. But in a lot of other genres you see artists being really anti-genre. You see a lot of hyphens now, post-punk-anti-rock-softcore-notmusic-newthing, and I love that stuff because we should be striving to invent and create new things and break out of limiting boxes. I notice that a lot of Queer Country artists have the opposite relationship with genre though, we all seem to be very clear that what we are making does in fact belong to a very specific genre. It means something for all of us to exist in this genre. 

That’s why It’s a priority to us that we make the most undeniably “country” music we possibly can. So that people are forced to say that what they don’t like about us is that we’re f*gg*ts and crossys. They’ll never be able to say we don’t make Capital C Country Music. I think it’s easier for someone to just expose themselves and own their bigotry out loud than to call a banjo-and-fiddle-heavy rendition of a 100 year old appalachian ballad “not country” just because the band has wigs on.

Both Drag and Country Music are two highly politicized topics in 2026, and while everything I said about how genuine both of these things are to us as people, we also can’t in good conscience ignore the political element of what we do. That definitely inspires our music to some degree, most notably of course on our debut single “All You Fascists (Bound to Lose)”. A song which takes the chorus from a Woody Guthrie protest song and reworks the verses to satirize the uptick in LGBTQ+ discrimination across the globe. We didn’t start the band as a political statement, but now that we’re here we ought to have something to say and something to stand for.

Tell me about your recently released EP, and a bit about the meaning behind each of the tracks.

Our debut EP ‘Back to the Cuntry’ (available everywhere now) was recorded almost a year ago, around the time of our one year anniversary as a band. We had songs written since we started that we were really excited about, but as a bar act who mostly played covers, we knew we couldn’t just drop our recorded music out of nowhere. I think we had this perception, especially those of us who had been doing drag for a long time and understood Toronto audiences, that our job up until that point was to entertain a crowd of people and facilitate the sale of alcohol. Few would wanna listen to 17 original songs from the Van Halen cover band who plays the 11pm slot at the grunge bar, they are undoubtedly fantastic musicians, but it’s not what their audience expects from them. Maybe that’s not true and I’m just cynical, but I just didn’t think our own kool-aid was drink-able enough to make Jell-O if that makes sense. Purely self doubt and nothing against Van Halen cover bands haha.

So the concept behind the record was to record live off the floor, to capture the feel of the thing we did best. Since we’d cut our teeth playing these high energy live shows (some of them 3 hours long) we wanted to translate that into a bite-sized recorded format. The EP is a loose, messy, pocket Ratskin show. It starts with the song we start every show with, and ends with the song we close out every show with before the encore. The tracks in between take a storytelling approach to representing untold aspects of Queer life.Stories are the foundation of Country Music, it would be inauthentic of us to tell stories of picking up ladies in our Ford F150’s, so to be truly country we had to sing about what we and other Queer people would know best. That happened to be cruising, murder and yearning. It sounds ridiculous but we actually did meet a Queer Truck Driver when we were on tour, who told us they loved our song “Trucker”. So that one goes out to all the cross dressing Truck Drivers cruising rest stop stalls across the nation. “Coyote” is our take on a very old style of Country Music that goes back as far as oral traditions go, the Murder Ballad. It includes everything from Knoxville Girl in the 40’s, to Goodbye Earl in the 90’s. It’s got a gay perspective that isn’t explicit. but it’s there, it’s in everything we do since that’s who we are. “Rodeo Clown” is such a beautiful song, Zephline wrote that one about being in love with a stage performer. I think it captures that feeling of devotion so well, wanting to express to someone the lengths you’d go to protect them and keep them safe. The record’s kinda got a little bit of everything, but what holds it all together is this commitment to authentic country music from a queer perspective, and the energy of a live band that loves to make music together.

What can attendess expect at your live performances?

You will never be able to expect what might happen at a Ratskin Family Band Show, you’ll just have to get a ticket and come find out

Read the following interview with The Grind Magazine from earlier this year to learn more about these Rats

Dressed in full drag, their set includes classics from artists like Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash, plus modern country hits and countrified versions of pop songs.

“We’ll take Lady Gaga’s ‘Abracadabra’ and turn it into a spaghetti-western, shoot-out duel kind of song,” says Amanda Prior, who plays banjo, guitar, and mandolin. “Or we’ll take a Chappell Roan song and turn it into western swing-meets-bluegrass tune.”

Throw in a few original tunes, and it’s guaranteed to be a rowdy and joyful night.

“There’s a saying: what do you get when you play a country song in reverse? You get your house, car, and wife back, and you get sober,” Prior tells The Grind. “When you play a Ratskin show backwards, you get your apartment, bus ticket, wife, and non-binary bear trade lover back, and you turn back into a boy.”

Prior, who describes herself as “the only glamazon with a beard,” first immersed herself in Toronto’s drag scene as a high school student. She quickly bonded with local drag queen Jelly over their love of the banjo and country music. For years, they would playfully talk about starting a country band together.

By 2023, Prior was struggling with her mental health and decided to pack up her wigs. Music became her main creative outlet and she dove deeper into playing the guitar, banjo and mandolin. On New Year’s Day, 2024, Prior and Jelly revived their idea to start a band, but Jelly had a new idea: “What if we performed in drag?” Encouraged by her friend, Prior agreed.

The pair reached out to other musicians through friends, acquaintances, and happenstance, and thus the Ratskin Family Band was born. As Prior is quick to point out, amazing things can happen when you leave your house and talk to people.

“There’s this wonderful thing that happens at Ratskin shows that mirrors how the band came together, which is that people will say hi to each other and become friends. We became a band by doing the same thing,” she explains. In addition to Prior and Jelly (guitar, harmonica and accordion), The Ratskin Family Band is: Zephline (guitar), Terrie Dikoff (bass), Tago Mago (drums), Kitty Creature (fiddle), and Sherry Douglas (Dobro, pedal steel).

The band recently went into the studio to record their debut EP, made up of original songs. While the EP won’t be on streaming services until the fall, CDs will be on sale at the band’s show in April. Singles will also be released via Bandcamp throughout the summer.

Their first single, “All You Fascists (Bound to Lose),” is inspired by the Woody Guthrie song of the same name, but reworks the verses through a queer lens to poke fun at the ridiculousness of transphobia, homophobia and the rise of discrimination that queer people are facing. It’s a foot-stomping, barnburner of a tune that twinkles with the spirit of a beautiful community of artists bedazzled in rhinestones.

“It’s queer, but it’s extremely country,” Prior says of the song. “You’ll notice that it doesn’t read as a drag queen pop song. It’s anti-fascist, but it’s not a punk song. It’s very important to us that our recorded music sounds undeniably country.”

Prior and the rest of the group are proud to be carrying on the tradition of queer country music. Despite the perception that country music is made for and by straight white conservative men, the genre is rooted in Black traditions and has a richly queer history. Canadian artists like k.d. lang, and, more recently, masked country crooner Orville Peck are among the biggest names in queer country music.

And of course there is the outspoken 2SLGBTQ+ ally and country music legend Dolly Parton, who has long held the title of gay icon. As Parton once famously said: “It’s a good thing I was born a girl, otherwise I’d be a drag queen.”

“Even though there’s a very small group of country musicians who are out, think about the people making the costumes, the guitar tech backstage, the banjo players, and the fiddle players. There have been queer people in country music since time immemorial, because queer and trans people have always existed,” Prior says.

“As much as we like to say that we’re the ‘first and only’ [drag country band], I think we’re simply picking up Dolly Parton’s wig in the relay race of it all.”

About the Author

Bryen Dunn is a freelance journalist with a focus on travel, lifestyle, entertainment and hospitality. He has an extensive portfolio of celebrity interviews with musicians, actors and other public personalities. He enjoys discovering delicious eats, tasting spirited treats, and being mesmerized by musical beats.