Best of What's Next: Searows

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For years, Paste has introduced exciting, up-and-coming artists to our readers. This is the Best of What’s Next, a monthly profile column which highlights new acts with big potential—the artists you’ll want to tell your friends about the minute you first hear their music. Explore them all here.

Last Christmas, my friend and fellow Paste contributor Jacqueline Codiga shared her spin on an iconic Breaking Bad-inspired meme featuring the songwriters bouncing in her head at the time. “The new Searows album is giving T-boy Phoebe Bridgers.” What? “The Skullcrusher album is Grouper for Phoebe Bridgers fans, but the Searows album is Phoebe Bridgers for Grouper fans.” While Skullcrusher, Grouper and Phoebe Bridgers are familiar faces writing music that all sound thoroughly distinct from each other, I found myself intrigued by the idea that some mystery songwriter was out there, inhabiting some alleged midpoint between these musicians who wed the personal, the mystical and the experimental with highly resonant, far left-of-center takes on folk music.

So, I turned on Guard Dog, the debut album from Searows—the project of Portland-based singer/songwriter Alec Duckart—and I heard it immediately: Duckart’s gossamer, closely held vocals draping gently over growing guitar were somehow both plainspoken and profound, dislodging intense feelings from my chest cavity and letting them take over my whole body. It was as clear-headed as Bridgers but just as ethereal as Skullcrusher. In that moment, it was obvious that the then-22-year-old had a command that few songwriters ever would, and since then, his profile has only exploded.

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When Duckart, now 23, and I get a chance to meet, he’s recuperating in Barcelona, nearing the end of his first European tour opening for youth indie pop phenom Gracie Abrams. After primarily operating as a social media indie artist-to-be, Duckart’s year has been one of meteoric escalation, performing alongside titans of today’s alternative like Ethel Cain and Matt Maltese. He’s choosy with his words, if only because he is hyper-aware of what words can do when arranged in just the right order—no use wasting breath with words that don’t carry their weight. As he looks back on what motivated him to become the songwriter we know today as Searows, he wants to do justice to the young man who nervously shared SoundCloud links with friends and family before becoming an international sensation.

Duckart’s origin story is as humble as any other: “In 7th grade, I learned the songs from the Juno soundtrack on guitar because they were simple and I loved that movie,” he says. Such devotion inspired him to learn song after song from his favorite musicians, before later growing dissatisfied with playing other people’s songs. It was in high school that Duckart began uploading evocative, personal musings on his guitar to SoundCloud, lifting the Searows name from his Tumblr persona. That he’d be so drawn to the personal, resonant sounds of glowing indie folk only made perfect sense: Duckart credits his Pacific Northwest upbringing with many of his sonic predilections, plus how the experience of being a teenager on Tumblr so often leads to an interest in art with heightened vulnerability. As Duckart explains: “I’ve been so drawn to the saddest music because the range of emotions you can experience beyond just gloom can be so incredible, but it can be hard to dwell in those feelings without something guiding you toward them.” Music with the emotional intensity needed to untie complicated feelings of grief or anxiety often possesses a cathartic property, something that Duckart has sought to recreate in his work as Searows.

Like many creators, Duckart found himself stifled by the weight of fear during the early pandemic period. However, it did not take very long for him to find his way back to his guitar and, without the option to share his heartfelt creations on stages for audiences, his then-partner encouraged him to turn to TikTok. The video-based platform is cacophonous and it can be hard to cut through the noise but, as Duckart notes, “…if there truly are that many people on that app all day, every day, it’s kind of that easy to get that kind of interaction and find people who like what you’re doing.” That’s exactly what he encountered, and between his 21st and 22nd birthdays, he wrote and shared songs on TikTok, steadily gaining the first audience he ever maintained beyond just family and close friends. It was through their devotion that he was inspired to compile his first album, Guard Dog, which he wrote, recorded and released himself towards the end of 2022.

Guard Dog is an album marked by its simplicity, ultimately presenting a young man, his guitar, and little else, thereby funneling all attention to the mysterious figure who put it all together. It’s through Guard Dog that the Searows experience coalesces into what is, ultimately, a cathartically glum listen. Rainy tracks like “Keep the Rain,” “Used To Be Friends,” “Haunted” and “Coming Clean” surround listeners in sepia tones, setting an immediately recognizable scene but also casting a spotlight on the young songwriter, letting him bear his all with little ornamentation.

Duckart produced the whole album—an hour-long suite—on GarageBand after he found the process of collaborating with LA-based producers suboptimal. Duckart worked from his Portland, Oregon home, trading emails and files back-and-forth with talents he respected, but he lacked the vocabulary needed to explain his distinct vision. So, in the end, he gave the self-recording and production process a go, practicing cycles of trial and error to achieve that dreamlike halo. Having his TikTok audience there to validate his progress as he shared performances and snippets from Guard Dog reinforced his decision to handle production in-house in the future, too. Duckart even released the album on his own, modeling the release process off of industry standards, and getting a little help from his tech-savvy mother with the distribution process.

The response was overwhelmingly positive. “I was worried that people wouldn’t like the songs because they wouldn’t translate from the TikTok videos they saw, so the response over this year has been surprising,” he says. The immediate outpour from Duckart’s established fanbase was immense but, in the year since, Guard Dog has worked to expand that audience across more listeners, TikTok users and non-users alike. Before touring with English singer/songwriter Matt Maltese, Duckart wrote “House Song” and shared an excerpt on TikTok, generating another reassuring approval from fans.

What took him off guard, however, was how the song gained a life of its own: “People kept using the TikTok sound on poetry slideshows and other nostalgia-coded stuff, so they wanted a full version.” While he felt apprehensive about how a full-version recording would hit listeners, the “House Song” single version has become a fan favorite, warranting 14 million streams in just shy of 10 months. “House Song” serves as another source of validation that Searows’ music is wanted beyond just its TikTok application; it’s a force to be reckoned with across the entire media landscape. It’s this organic, earnest spread that he pursued that helped his music get into the ears of Ethel Cain, whose album Preacher’s Daughter Duckart treasures. The two joined forces on stage this past spring, upping Searows’ credibility with discerning, stalwart fans of Cain’s rising stardom.

As a young person, the sounds of the Pacific Northwest (think Phil Elverum) certainly guided Duckart’s early works, but the band that he finds himself coming back to again and again is Daughter. It makes perfect sense: Ever since the moody Britishfolk trio burst onto the scene, they’ve incorporated the gravitas of Florence & The Machine with the quietude of The xx. “I listened to them through middle and high school,” Duckart says. “When I first heard them, there was something that kept me going back because they were making music exactly like I wanted to be making. It was in the writing, the intimacy, everything about it.” Now, Searows and Daughter are directly linked: In late 2011, Daughter released their second EP, The Wild Youth, via Communion Records. Just last month, Duckart unveiled his latest formal release as Searows: an alluring 6-track EP, End Of The World, the first release on Communion-partnered label Last Recordings on Earth, founded by Maltese.

End Of The World is a bold statement from Searows, sonically and thematically. Where Guard Dog languished beneath gloom as if it were a towering, malevolent stack of blankets, crushing him beneath the lulling softness of depression, End Of The World imagines something more. While the title suggests a sadness with a catastrophic denouement for the entire planet, the EP offers suggestions of hope that the album did not. Both address similar emotions that Duckart encounters regularly, anxiety especially, but the EP suggests that nerve spirals have an ephemeral quality, that there is a possibility to live beyond those cycles.

At first, Duckart wasn’t sure he had the right to go back to those same emotions when writing the EP, which he accomplished over the spring and summer of 2023: “I felt like I was writing about the same stuff over and over again. I felt like I can’t do that. But I can, and I will,” he says. “That’s human nature. I keep writing about the same things and people continue to identify with them because those feelings don’t go away.” He explains that he relies on repetition often in his songs because he fixates and repeats the same fears when he feels anxious. “Funny” addresses that experience head-on, wrapping up with the profound “I can’t heal what I hold on to,” a powerful revelation that letting go is his best tool.

“I have more than enough” is one of the songs where anxieties and hope are made manifest: Facing a deadline, Duckart experienced writers’ block that threatened to set the EP’s release back. He could feel himself slipping into nerves, so he carted himself out on a long walk. As it turns out, that walk was all he needed to generate perhaps the most moving track on End of the World. As he paws at his guitar, he realizes that the world around him, the community he’s cultivated and the spaces where he’s taken up residence are absolutely enough to keep him going. While most tracks on the EP are a mix of studio recording and collaborative production, Duckart wrote, recorded, and produced everything on “I have more than enough” in Portland. He still functions brilliantly in DIY contexts, but signing with Maltese’s label Last Recordings on Earth offered the best of both worlds for Searows: creative control and supportive infrastructure.

The nearly seven-minute long EP opener “Older” is a triumph in itself, demonstrating where Searows is headed next after years of diaphanous guitar folk. The orchestration, strumming and soaring vocals are reminiscent of Bon Iver, piercing through crisp northern autumns with the same gentleness Duckart displays with the goats featured on the EP’s cover. His enthusiasm for cinema soundtracks shines through here as the song meanders, picking up steam like his favorite dramas. The song’s fortitude echoes the lyrical commitment to resiliency he’s pursuing. As he narrates the complicated trajectories of individual growth and interpersonal relationships, “Older” creeps northward in pressure before he opens the floodgates, drums crashing and keys marching not unlike the best of Radical Face. To open with “Older” on the EP was a bold move, one that sets it up for more drama, and while Duckart sculpts it in different ways, there’s little doubt that he delivers.

As ready as Duckart indicated he was for rest upon the closure of the Gracie Abrams European tour, he’s so taken by her fans, many of whom have studied his music just as well as hers before making their way to the show. He’s met fans who’ve bounced across the continent, following the tour and singing along to both of their songs and engaging with his performances with curiosity. In an era where it feels like technology is pushing listeners towards mindless consumption of the most profitable pop stars, these fans have affirmed his desire to keep recording, producing, and releasing new projects. He’s reluctant to move on from GarageBand, but even he admits that finagling all the voices he wants in the program is becoming entirely too unwieldy.

As Searows, Alec Duckart serves as a brilliant reminder that young people are looking for beautiful earnestness, for representations of emotions that both go beyond the surface and treat the surface with the care it needs. As fans of popular and alternative music turn to social media for additional art, they’re finding, following and supporting their favorites through the winding paths their career may take, so long as the artist continues to release genuine, exciting art. If there’s any young gun off TikTok who’s proven his dedication to craft and honesty, it’s Searows. End of the World shows how hungry he is for artistic growth without abandoning the foundation on which he built his project, showing off his knack for adaptation and evolution before it’s even really been demanded of him. And it’s only just begun.

Devon Chodzin is a critic and urban planner with bylines at Aquarium Drunkard, Bandcamp Daily, Slumber Mag and more. He is currently a student in Philadelphia. He lives on Twitter @bigugly.

Best of What’s Next: Searows