Rat Columns is the guitar-heavy, indie pop branch of operations for the very busy David West where he leans into a song-based, jangle-meets-fuzz sound. The group's early records are drenched in distortion and show a large debt to Dinosaur Jr., but by the time of 2021’s pristine Pacific Kiss, West refined the group's approach to approximate something that wouldn't sound out of place on the noisier outskirts of the Sarah Records discography. Ever the iconoclast, West switched to a murkier, less hooky approach on 2023's Babydoll.