In a departure from the typical Gen Z route of confessional songwriting, indie musician Alec Duckart – also known as Searows – instead takes inspiration from fish guts, shipwrecks and death. “Bones and whales and the ocean in general,” he explains. “The violent, monster type of ocean has always been really fascinating and terrifying to me.”
This dark maritime thread is woven through his fantastic second album, Death in the Business of Whaling. It’s the first project the 26-year-old Oregon native has released since gaining a mass of new fans, having opened for pop stars such as Gracie Abrams, Ethel Cain and Matt Maltese on their recent tours. Duckart – who rose to online fame as a teenager singing about isolation and heartbreak in the throes of the pandemic – first became known on TikTok for his gossamer voice paired with candid but poetic lyrics that brought to mind Sufjan Stevens or Arlo Parks.
Death in the Business of Whaling borrows its title from Moby-Dick – even though Duckart hasn’t read the book. Instead, he acted in a school production of Herman Melville’s novel, an early means of performing to an audience and, at the same time, overcoming his shy nature. Eventually he began uploading songs to TikTok, where he developed a devoted following who watched as he sang from his childhood bedroom.
Performing songs from his 2022 debut Guard Dog or his 2024 EP End of the World, he inspires the kind of emotional response you might expect to see at a Bon Iver concert. At his release show in January, fans openly wept while he sang. In the past, his lush vocals have sparked comparisons with Phoebe Bridgers’ genre-defining lilt. But on DITBW, Duckart steps into his own sound for something more confident and more polished than ever before. His voice, like a siren song through the mist, has an eerie calmness that reels listeners in with a clear, entrancing intimacy.
While Duckart has written vulnerable lyrics in the past, DITBW ventures into uncharted territory by exploring themes of memory, regret, and the inevitability of death, through the use of characters and world-building. “I think I felt stuck in confessional storytelling,” he tells me over coffee in a New York diner. He’s striking to look at, with a sharp jawline and black hair that tumbles around a pale, serious face. He has a gentle nature, fidgeting occasionally as he explains his shift to a darker, more abstract kind of songwriting. “I didn’t know how I could keep writing about the same things over and over. It has to turn into something else – that’s how the memory of those things works.”
Before turning to music full time, Duckart had a job at a retirement home, where he formed close relationships with people in the final years of their lives. It shaped his perspective on death and ageing, but also made him reflect on the idea of purpose. He says he sometimes wonders if his career as a songwriter is as meaningful as his previous job: “It just felt very rewarding in a way that… It’s hard, because sometimes music feels like it’s so isolated.”
DITBW dragged Duckart out of self-imposed isolation, marking the first time he’d recorded an entire album at a professional studio. He flew to Washington state to work with producer Trevor Spencer – whose credits include albums by Father John Misty and Fleet Foxes – just outside Seattle. Previously wary of allowing other people to touch his works in progress, Duckart knew that the album he had spent more than two years writing required a new perspective. Still, relinquishing control was an “incredible and scary” meditation. “And also made it so that I couldn’t obsess over whatever we did, which was really good for me,” he adds.
Given that he grew up listening to artists like Gillian Welch and Neko Case in the winding forests near the rainy Oregon coastline, it’s no wonder that Duckart’s music sometimes seems soaked in gloom. On the record, nostalgia drips through the cracks in “Junie”, inspired by Duckart’s high-school guidance counsellor, and the closing track “Geese”, which directly references Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese”. Duckart says he wrote the song in response to its opening line: “You do not have to be good.”
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“I didn’t understand the first line of that poem for so long,” he says. “I knew what she was saying, but I just thought, ‘That doesn’t apply. I do have to be good, actually. I don’t know what else to be.’” His coffee has gone cold, and our allotted hour has long since passed. “I think that when I live with the fear of not being morally pure or good all the time, whatever that means, it has only really led me to not being anything,” he explains. “It fully stops me in every aspect of life. Like, I just get frozen in not wanting to be bad, or something nuanced, anything morally grey.” He pauses, before concluding: “Ultimately, you have to do something. You can’t do nothing.”
‘Death in the Business of Whaling’ is out now. Searows is currently touring in Europe and the UK before the North American leg of the tour begins on 23 April
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