Ducks Ltd. have announced their sophomore LP, Harm’s Way. The follow-up to 2021’s Modern Fiction is set to drop on February 9 via Carpark. Today, the Toronto duo has previewed it with the track ‘Hollowed Out’, which features backing vocals from Ratboys’ Julia Steiner and Marcus Nuccio (who also plays drums on the song), Dehd’s Jason Balla, and Moontype’s Margaret McCarthy, as well as strings arranged and performed by Finom’s Macie Stewart. Check out a video for it below, and scroll down for the album’s cover art and tracklist.
“There was a sinkhole that opened up on Dundas West a little while ago, in an area near to where I live,” singer/lyricist Tom McGreevy said of the new song in a statement. “It shut down the road for a month. It had a strange resonance, partly because a lot of the streets in Toronto used to be rivers and streams running down to the lake that roads were then built over. It felt like an encroachment of nature into an urban environment–the river coming back to collapse a piece of civic infrastructure, and I built the song around the feeling that evoked. It’s about living with decline. About the feeling that the horizon of possibility in the world is forever being drawn in to align with the edges of the imaginations of a small group of careless rich people. And about existing through a state of ongoing catastrophe over which we have no control.”
Harm’s Way was produced by Dave Vettraino and includes the previously released single ‘The Main Thing’. “They’re songs about struggling,” McGreevy added. “About watching people I care for suffer, and trying to figure out how to be there for them. And about the strain of living in the world when it feels like it’s ready to collapse.”
In addition to Stewart, Steiner, Nuccio, Balla, and McCarthy, the record also features contributions from Nathan O’Dell (Dummy), Rui De Magalhaes (Lawn), and Lindsey-Paige McCloy (Patio), as well as the band’s touring drummer, Jonathan Pappo, and bassist Julia Wittman. “Historically our process has been really tightly controlled and insular,” McGreevy explained. “On this record, we worked with people who we trusted with a pretty wide range of musical backgrounds and they had approaches and ideas that helped open up the record’s sonic palette.”
Revisit our Artist Spotlight interview with Duckts Ltd.
Harm’s Way Cover Artwork:
Harm’s Way Tracklist:
1. Hollowed Out
2. Cathedral City
3. The Main Thing
4. Train Full of Gasoline
5. Deleted Scenes
6. On Our Way To The Rave
7. A Girl, Running
8. Harm’s Way
9. Heavy Bag
