Though Death in the Business of Whaling arrives as Searows’ second album, it’s the product of many firsts, including his first time recording outside the creative cocoon of his bedroom. His 2022 debut Guard Dog was written, recorded and self-produced in Duckart’s Portland home and independently released with little expectation as to how it would be received. The music soon found a passionate audience that were already sharing snippets of Duckart’s music via communities on TikTok.

Time spent on the road touring the hushed and compelling songs from Guard Dog and subsequent projects End Of The World and flush was instructive when working out the direction his new material would take musically and lyrically, with collections of ideas for his new record starting to take real shape in late 2024. When the time came to commit them to tape, he set up shop in a converted horse barn outside of Seattle, keen to harness a greater sense of scale and space in the creation of the music, working this time with co-producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Beach House, Mary Lattimore) to expand his creative vision.

“I had really wonderfully connective and intimate experiences sharing my first couple of projects with live audiences. Those projects were very personal and vulnerable and revealing my life and specific experiences to an audience began to feel a bit dissonant and exposing,” he explains. “One of my favourite things about music is its ability to connect people. It has done so for me time and time again and it has been so special to see my own writing do that for people too. I just began to learn that for myself, there were specifics that I wanted to keep for myself.”

As a result, Duckart became interested in writing songs that read more like folklore. The songs became a vessel for digging deep and exploring his life and point of view, but in a way that spoke outwardly more symbolically than literally. “Something your subconscious understands before your conscious mind does. Visceral rather than literal. And that relationship to our deeper selves, our subconscious, our souls, is a major theme of the album for me. Most of these songs are about the different ways we all bump up against the human condition. Our spirit, the shadow self, our egos, trauma, love and fate. How we cope with our experiences and how we connect and take care of one another in an exceedingly dark and violent world. This record is still deeply personal to me. But it is an attempt to reveal my cards in a more coded, symbolic manner.”