Searows takes the long way around on Death in the Business of Whaling, a nine-song record that trades in foggy dread, half-lit tenderness, and imagery that keeps twitching in your peripheral vision. Alec Duckart wrote these songs with the ocean on the brain and Herman Melville on the nightstand, pulling the title from Moby-Dick and then using that borrowed sentence as a crowbar. Not to explain anything. More to pry.
Here’s a practical detail that changes how the album lands: Duckart didn’t make this one as a sealed-bedroom project. He recorded it outside of home, working with Trevor Spencer. You can hear the shift in the space around the instruments, especially when the arrangements start to stack and the guitars turn from fingerpicked to scorched. The songs still feel private, but the sound has more depth to fall into and more room for impact when the drums finally decide to be drums.
Belly of the Whale opens like a slow descent, voice hovering close while the track builds an atmosphere that feels damp, grey, and unavoidably physical. Duckart’s delivery has that delicate, high-register ache that recalls Phoebe Bridgers, but the mood here is less confessional diary and more internal monologue you weren’t meant to overhear. The lyric about staying in the whale’s belly lands with a bluntness that doesn’t ask for sympathy. It’s simply reported, like the weather.
From there, Kill What You Eat stretches into something thornier and more confrontational, the language getting sharp around the edges. The song keeps returning to the body, to survival, to the mess of trying to live decently while carrying uglier instincts in your pocket. It moves in long, tense lines, then suddenly snaps into a phrase that sticks, like you’ve brushed against cold metal. If you’ve followed Duckart’s earlier work, the shift isn’t about becoming louder for the sake of it. It’s about letting the song stay uncomfortable instead of resolving into prettiness.
That discomfort turns cinematic on Dearly Missed, which plays like a grim little narrative you can’t pause. Guitars flare, then recede; the drums toll rather than drive. The writing leans into ambiguity, but not the vague kind that feels like a dodge. More like the way real trauma gets remembered, clear in sensation, blurry in sequence. A detail, a colour, a sound, then the mind refusing to connect the dots because connecting them would make the thing too real.
The album’s most immediate punch might be Hunter, which brings in a thicker low end and a sharper sense of motion. The lyrics’ violence sits right on the surface. No metaphors needed. The track’s tension comes from how calmly it’s delivered, as the narrator has already accepted what they’re capable of and is now negotiating the terms.
Mid-album, Dirt slows the pulse again, and the writing turns to circles: bodies returning to earth, the quiet dread of caretaking, the question of what anyone can actually do for someone they love when love doesn’t fix the underlying problem. It’s one of the record’s most affecting moments because it refuses the big dramatic gesture. It sits with the small, humiliating truths. The throat-clench. The wish to take something back. The ache of realizing you can’t.
Then Junie and In Violet tilt the light a little. Not into happiness, exactly, but into something softer, almost luminous at the edges. In Violet arrives on a bed of droning sound and then folds banjo into the mix, a choice that should feel quaint on paper but comes off strangely modern here, like an old instrument being used to describe a very current kind of longing. Duckart keeps the vocal intimate, close-mic’d enough that you catch the breath and the slight waver, which becomes its own form of honesty.
The closer, Geese, doesn’t deliver closure. It doesn’t really try. The song feels like calling out across distance, then listening to the silence that answers back. That’s where the album’s title starts to feel less like literary garnish and more like a genuine preoccupation: the body, the soul, the mess between them, and the way people carry each other in memory even when they can’t carry each other in life.
The atmosphere is strong, and it stays strong. For some people, that’s the entire appeal: a record you sink into and don’t climb out of until the last note. For others, it might take a couple of plays before individual tracks separate and stand on their own outlines.
Still, the consistency feels intentional. Duckart seems less interested in variety as a flex than in building a sealed emotional climate and letting you decide whether to breathe it in. I kept thinking about that whaling line, the one that frames death as part of the job, part of the daily machinery, and then I kept thinking about something less literary and more ordinary: how often people live with dread like it’s a household appliance.
That’s the feeling Death in the Business of Whaling leaves behind. A lingering chill, a bruised tenderness, and the sense that Duckart has figured out how to make scale and intimacy coexist in the same breath.
“Death in the Business of Whaling” will be released on 23 January 2026 via Last Recordings on Earth.
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Photo Credit: Marlowe Ostara
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