Herman Melville<\/a>\u2019s 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. <\/p>\nPerforming 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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cI think I felt stuck in confessional storytelling,\u201d he tells me over coffee in a New York diner. He\u2019s 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. \u201cI didn\u2019t know how I could keep writing about the same things over and over. It has to turn into something else \u2013 that\u2019s how the memory of those things works.\u201d<\/p>\n
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: \u201cIt just felt very rewarding in a way that… It\u2019s hard, because sometimes music feels like it\u2019s so isolated.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Alec](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/searows.jpg\")
Alec Duckart, known by his stage name Searows, has released his sophomore album \u2018Death in the Business of Whaling\u2019 (Marlowe Ostara)<\/p>\n
DITBW dragged Duckart out of self-imposed isolation, marking the first time he\u2019d recorded an entire album at a professional studio. He flew to Washington state to work with producer Trevor Spencer \u2013 whose credits include albums by Father John Misty and Fleet Foxes \u2013 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 \u201cincredible and scary\u201d meditation. \u201cAnd also made it so that I couldn\u2019t obsess over whatever we did, which was really good for me,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n
Given that he grew up listening to artists like Gillian Welch and Neko Case in the winding forests near the rainy Oregon coastline, it\u2019s no wonder that Duckart\u2019s music sometimes seems soaked in gloom. On the record, nostalgia drips through the cracks in \u201cJunie\u201d, inspired by Duckart\u2019s high-school guidance counsellor, and the closing track \u201cGeese\u201d, which directly references Mary Oliver\u2019s poem \u201cWild Geese\u201d. Duckart says he wrote the song in response to its opening line: \u201cYou do not have to be good.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t understand the first line of that poem for so long,\u201d he says. \u201cI knew what she was saying, but I just thought, \u2018That doesn\u2019t apply. I do have to be good, actually. I don\u2019t know what else to be.\u2019\u201d His coffee has gone cold, and our allotted hour has long since passed. \u201cI 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,\u201d he explains. \u201cIt 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.\u201d He pauses, before concluding: \u201cUltimately, you have to do something. You can\u2019t do nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Death in the Business of Whaling\u2019 is out now. Searows is currently touring in Europe and the UK before the North American leg of the tour begins on 23 April<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":383182,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[93,61,60,278],"class_list":["post-383181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/383182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}