Searows
Searows, the project of Pacific Northwest singer-songwriter and guitarist Alec Duckart, releases his new album, Death in the Business of Whaling, on January 23, 2026 via Last Recordings On Earth. 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, as well as co-signs from artists like Ethel Cain, Gracie Abrams and Robin Pecknold.
When the time came to commit the collection of ideas for his new record 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.”
Boyish
Boyish take you on a trip to Gun: a surreal love story set in an imaginary town, and their debut album out now on the record label R&R (Dijon, Mk.gee). Introducing “the lushest they’ve ever sounded” (Stereogum), and “playing out like a 3am dissociation” (Alternative Press), this set of 11 songs marks the start of an intrepid and colossal new chapter for a band that has been called “the next big thing in the queer indie scene” (Billboard). Since their early days rehearsing above a strip club called Pumps, Boyish’s India Shore and Claire Altendahl have worked together like a gas station coffee and donut – the perfection combination. But Gun marks the first album they have made in a studio and on a tape machine, not an apartment on a laptop. Alongside Loren Humphrey (Cameron Winter, Lana Del Rey), they produced the record fully analog, with no click tracks and just five instruments, during two months spent in the uncanny village of Tuxedo Park, NY.
“Prom” follows similarly stunning and otherworldly videos for “BIG” and “Jumbos,”further unfolding the narrative and characters that define Gun. Inspired by the 4-5 years that Boyish spent driving across middle-of-nowhere America, and the freak surfing accident that left Shore bedridden for three months, Gun is not a pro-gun album, but a pro-Gun album. The lore is heavy, but the music is heavier. With massive guitars, pulverizing drums, soaring lead vocals, ghostly overtures of strings and a devastating evolution of emotion, each song pummels you further down the rabbit hole, and deeper into a murky place where the atmosphere is thick, and time is indefinite.
“This album is a love story set in a small town in America,” said Boyish, in a new interview with Wonderland. “We were trying to think of what to call the town our story takes place in, and asked ourselves, ‘What’s the most American name you can think of?’ The answer was pretty easy. We wanted it to run like a play, where if there’s a gun on the wall at the beginning of a play, by the end of it, it has to go off. Treating the music as if it all had to amount to something, and figuring out what all of these things are supposed to boil down to in the end. The end product is something that is fictional, but emotionally very true. It’s really about longing for something, or someone, and how that feeling manifests itself in different ways.”
While Boyish have collaborated with King Princess and Rachel Chinouriri, toured with The Beaches, Claud, Hippo Campus and spill tab, appeared on a compilation record alongside Taylor Swift, Julien Baker and Girl in Red, and were named winners of the LGBTQ+ Emerging Artist Award, all while amassing 30+ million streams.
