About FCUKERS:
fcukers’ explosive ascendance began downtown in New York City. In a fast-track three years spent amassing millions of streams, playing Glastonbury, Primavera, Lollapalooza, and Coachella, and supporting LCD Soundsystem and Tame Impala in arenas, the band earned BBC Radio 1’s Future Artist of the Month and spots on both Spotify and Amazon’s Artists to Watch lists. Audiences worldwide crave the party fugue state their riotous live shows are built to create. Now, fcukers are releasing their debut album, Ö.
The genre-bending album collages dub, UK garage, trip-hop, and 2000s hip-hop, with modern sounds spontaneously merged in unique and measured ways. Minimal arrangements keep the tracks focused and direct, paired with the band’s staple mantra-like lyrics. Ö plays like a DJ set, taking the listener on a wild, metaphorical night out.
While on the West Coast, during the week between Coachella sets, the band grabbed coffee with producer Kenneth Blume (fka Kenny Beats). At his studio, they played a track they’d been considering for the album, “Feel the Real.” Unprompted, Blume suggested Wise and Lewis get in the room and just play. Within an hour, they had something — and Ö’s first single, “L.U.C.K.Y.,” was born. Blume cleared his schedule.
When fcukers returned to the studio Monday morning, “Play Me” was the first track laid down and cut within an hour. In two whirlwind weeks, with Blume bringing in heavy hitters like Dylan Brady (100 gecs) and Tom Norris (Lady Gaga, Charli XCX, The Weeknd) to produce and mix, Ö was essentially complete.
In late 2022, Shanny Wise met LA-born Jackson Walker Lewis in her native Lower East Side of Manhattan. Introduced by a mutual friend — both formerly in indie rock bands — their collaborative potential was immediate. Lewis was DJing most nights downtown, spinning the house music he grew up on: Armand Van Helden, DJ Sneak, Todd Terry, and others from the era. Wise, meanwhile, was writing and experimenting with electronic music herself.
They began meeting regularly, at first weekly, without urgency or expectation — making beats, experimenting across genres, building a disco track here, a techno loop there, ideating and iterating until it clicked.
The band’s first released track, “Mothers,” recorded in Lewis’s apartment, inspired their debut live show at Baby’s All Right — delivering what Paper Magazine called “an electric live performance, pumping up the whole room.” The band seemed to spring fully formed, never wavering in identity.
Lewis pounded the keyboard. A close friend danced topless at the back of the stage. The tightly packed crowd never stopped jumping as Wise’s hypnotic vocals cut through commanding beats and booming drums. The response was palpable and galvanic — setting fcukers’ fate in motion.
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.
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.
