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Dec 01, 2023 By Mark Redfern Photography by Colin Medley

Toronto-based duo Ducks Ltd. have announced a new album, Harm’s Way, and shared a new song from it, “Hollowed Out,” via a music video. Harm’s Way is due out February 9, 2024 via Carpark. Colin Medley directed “Hollowed Out” video. Watch it below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover artwork, as well as the band’s upcoming tour dates.

Ducks Ltd. is Tom McGreevy and Evan Lewis. Harm’s Way is the follow-up to Modern Fiction, which came out in 2021 via Carpark and was one of our Top 100 Albums of 2021.

“Hollowed Out” features backing vocals from Ratboys’ Julia Steiner and Marcus Nuccio (who also plays drums on the track), Dehd’s Jason Balla, and Moontype’s Margaret McCarthy. Finom’s Macie Stewart arranged and performed the strings.

McGreevy had this to say about the single in a press release: “There was a sinkhole that opened up on Dundas West a little while ago, in an area near to where I live. 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.”

McGreevy had this to say about the rest of the tracks on the album: “They’re songs about struggling. 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.”

Ducks Ltd. previously shared the album’s first single “The Main Thing,” via a music video. “The Main Thing” was one of our Songs of the Week.

Dave Vettraino (Deeper, Lala Lala, Dehd) produced the album, which was recorded in Chicago.

Ducks Ltd. say they found themselves in a more confident place when recording Harm’s Way.

“When we got signed, we had played maybe five or six shows ever. After last year, it’s in the hundreds. That experience can change your perception of your own music and songwriting,” says McGreevy. “In the past when we got stuck on a song we had a tendency to look at our favorite records to see how they tackled it. But now, instead of asking ‘what would Orange Juice do?’, we’d ask, ‘what would we do?’”

The band released a new single in 2022, “Sheets of Grey.” It was one of our Songs of the Week but isn’t included on the new album.

Last year the band launched a cover song series, The Sincerest Form of Flattery. It included a cover of The Cure’s “In Between Days,” which featured Jane Inc (the project of Carlyn Bezic), as well as a cover of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s 1989 song “Head On.”

Read our The End interview with Tom McGreevy.

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

Ducks Ltd. Tour Dates:
12/2/23 - Queens, NY @ TV Eye*
02/08/24 - Toronto, ON @ Sonic Boom#
02/10/24 - Montreal, QC @ Taverne Tour Festival
05/27/24 - London, UK @ Moth Club

* The Ophelias and Golden Apples support
# Only God Forgives and Cootie Catcher support

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