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 that's 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 started writing his first songs on guitar in middle school, and at age 16 began uploading his music to Soundcloud and Bandcamp.
Once Duckart started sharing videos on TikTok, he soon gathered a cult following with 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. Instead of painting autobiographical pictures, he used fiction to circle more nebulous emotions and concepts.
"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. His 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, and to wonder about how those two states of being might blur together.
The title of the album comes from Herman Mellville’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 caught on that passage while flipping through books looking for possible titles for the record. "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 was the first time he had recorded a whole album in a studio other than the one he keeps at home. Working collaboratively with Spencer helped him build the songs to the heights their subject matter demanded.
Staying in an Airbnb overlooking the Sammamish river, Duckart found that the change in scenery helped him usher in the album's dramatic shifts in sound. Leaving mixing to Spencer, and unable to access his works in progress after he left the studio for the day, Duckart felt some of his perfectionistic tendencies relax. "If I'm not mixing the music myself, there are so many other creative elements that 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 came out of these sessions approaches like a colossus in fog: partially visible, partially wreathed, and staggering in its scale. Opener "Belly of the Whale" sends banjo chords darting through the drone of a bowed upright bass while Duckart's vocals slice through with whispered urgency. "Hunter" shows its teeth with crashing drums and heavy guitars; the gentler "Junie" meanders through clouds of enveloping reverb; and "Dearly Missed" oscillates between palm-muted chords and full, unsheathed distortion as Duckart sings about someone driving off a bridge into a river, never to be seen again. Images crystallize and dissolve, alternatively concrete and dissociative, until we settle into the darkening sky of the album's closer "Geese," where Duckart's voice and guitar flicker through a thinning Wurlitzer haze, as if he’s calling someone back from the brink of oblivion.
Each song on this album shivers with the urgency of the untranslatable – those concepts and emotions that are 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," says Duckart. "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 you to immerse yourself 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.
