About MICO:
Long before he had his first Canadian radio hit, MICO was a star in his own home. Born and raised in Toronto, he was the fourth of five siblings. His father filled the house with ’80s pop hits by Michael Jackson and The Police, and when guests came over, the family encouraged 6-year-old MICO to hop on the karaoke — he didn’t object. “I never thought about doing anything else in my life, because singing was the thing that was most fun to me,” he says. As a tween, he dove into the brazenly emotional music that would shape his path most — era-defining acts like 5 Seconds of Summer, Fall Out Boy, and The All-American Rejects. When he got his hands on a guitar, he taught himself the chords to their hits by watching their finger placements in music videos.
The screen became a two-way conduit as a teenage MICO worked his way into “Discord’s Got Talent” events, hopping between servers and performing cover songs to online communities. As he cultivated a loyal following, MICO pivoted to writing and self-releasing originals, starting with 2019’s “who do you love,” a striking mix of personal vulnerability and musical confidence. After graduating high school in 2020, he used a gap year to start posting songs on TikTok. It was time wisely spent — today, MICO has nearly 1 million loyal “amicos” on the platform. Over a series of EPs leading to his aptly titled Internet hometown hero, which got a 2025 deluxe reissue, MICO found his own path back to his influences, forging an original, pop-infused alternative sound.
As MICO’s creativity carried him from URL spaces to IRL stages, his work also grew increasingly personal. Viral bops like 2022’s “cut my hair” found him struggling with maintaining his identity amid romantic ruin, while 2024’s streaming hit “HOMESICK” sets the scene for the disconnect that fuels When the lights turn on. On new song “Like you mean it,” he pleads with a partner to face the facts of their uneven love: “You can’t call it healing, running from a feeling / I can’t be the only good thing that you’ve got / So love me like you mean it, not like you need it.” But on the next track, “Do it all again,” he’s the one chasing a connection that’s doomed to fail.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
About Searows:
Some music engulfs you like a freezing wave — so totalizing that you lose track of where you end and where the experience passing through you begins. Death in the Business of Whaling, the new album from Oregon-based songwriter Alec Duckart, a.k.a. Searows, is one of those records that soaks you to the bone.
A bold evolution from the indie-folk of Duckart’s earlier releases, Whaling steers toward the megalithic expanses of shoegaze, drone, and Undersea-era Antlers, folding an array of new sounds into Searows’ organic palette. It’s an arresting document of a young artist coming into his own, and a probing meditation on life, death, embodiment, and the tangled threads that connect all three.
A lifelong denizen of the Pacific Northwest, Duckart makes music deeply inflected by his surroundings — the dramatic coastline with massive rock formations rearing from the waves, the persistent gloom, the lush overgrowth of abundant forests. He began writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 started uploading his music to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart began sharing videos on TikTok, he quickly gathered a cult following drawn to his timeless, old-world sensibilities and sensitive lyricism. Albums and EPs like 2022’s Guard Dog and 2023’s End of the World established him as a compelling storyteller, leading him to share stages with Gracie Abrams and Ethel Cain. Whaling breaches into newfound cinematic intensity — a collection of songs that converge like weather systems over choppy grey waters.
Duckart started writing the songs on Whaling in 2023. Even before he had a full sense of the album’s sound, he found himself energized by approaching his lyrics in a newly abstract way. Rather than painting autobiographical pictures, he turned to fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and ideas.
“I started letting myself write about whatever I was interested in without worrying about whether it conveyed something personal in an obvious way,” he says. The songs found their anchors in recurring images: the unknowable vastness of the ocean, the biblical Leviathan, Jonah lost in the belly of the whale. Duckart used these stories to plumb the mysterious bridge between life and death, wondering how those two states of being might blur together.
The album’s title comes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick:
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. … Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.”
Duckart came across the passage while flipping through books in search of a title. “What I got from that paragraph is that you aren’t just your body and your physical self,” he says. “I was thinking of death and life as part of the same process that continues through itself.”
To record the album, Duckart traveled to Washington to work with producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Mary Lattimore, Beach House) at Way Out Studios. It marked the first time he’d recorded a full album outside his home studio. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the scale their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish River, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped usher in the album’s dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing duties to Spencer — and unable to access works in progress once he left the studio each day — Duckart felt some of his perfectionist tendencies loosen.
“If I’m not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements I can focus on,” he says. “It was definitely scary to give up that control, but it ended up being so much better for my creative process.”
The music that emerged from these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog — partially visible, partially obscured, and staggering in scale. Opener “Belly of the Whale” sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass as Duckart’s vocals cut through with whispered urgency. “Hunter” bares its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler “Junie” drifts through clouds of enveloping reverb; and “Dearly Missed” oscillates between palm-muted chords and unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings of someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again.
Images crystallize and dissolve, alternating between the concrete and the dissociative, until the album settles into the darkening sky of closer “Geese,” where Duckart’s voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze — as if calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on Death in the Business of Whaling shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable — emotions felt far more powerfully than they can ever be articulated. “I feel like I am never able to explain my thoughts in a way that justifies them,” Duckart says. “Music is really the one way I feel I can communicate well.”
Sometimes the most immediate way to share a feeling is to plunge in and see what surfaces. Death in the Business of Whaling invites listeners to immerse themselves with all the conviction of an artist who believes in the transformative power of the depths. When you come up for air, you’ll be different.
