• News

• All

Aug 17, 2021 By Mark Redfern Photography by Chritiane Johnson and Laura Hermiston

Toronto-based duo Ducks Ltd. are releasing their debut full-length album, Modern Fiction, on October 1 via Carpark. Now they have shared its second single, “How Lonely Are You?,” which features labelmates The Beths. It was shared via a John Smith-directed video. Watch it below.

The band features Evan Lewis on lead guitar and Tom McGreevy on vocals and rhythm guitar.

“This song is about personal connection in an environment that is hostile to it, and about friendships with people who are physically distant,” McGreevy says in a press release. “Me and Evan have both moved around a lot, and have friends in far off places we don’t see as often as we’d like. In fact, we partly made this record while Evan was living in Australia and I was in Toronto. Some of those friendships are extremely important to me, and the song is kind of about grasping for those lifelines when it’s particularly difficult to believe that things are going to work out, or if there’s even any point in trying.”

The video features shots of McGreevy on the Canadian side of the Niagara Falls border, with Lewis on the American side. “Me and Evan had not been in the same country for about five months when this video was shot,” explains McGreevy. “He’d been in Australia and I was stuck in Canada owing to the COVID border rules. Those rules made it complicated for him to return to Canada for a minute so he was in the U.S. and Niagara Falls was the closest we could get to each other. Making something that involved us being separated by a border (and a million billion gallons of water), and experiencing two parallel weird tourist towns felt like a good fit with what the song is about. It didn’t make the final cut, but we waved to each other over the falls through binoculars at one point. First time we’d seen each other since February!”

Previously the band shared its first single, “18 Cigarettes,” via a video for it. “18 Cigarettes” was one of our Songs of the Week.

Modern Fiction follows their Get Bleak EP, which was originally put out in 2019 and given an expanded reissue by Carpark this past May. It included the new song, “As Big As All Outside.”

Producer James Cecil (The Goon Sax, Architecture in Helsinki) put finishing touches on the album and Carpark labelmates The Beths did backing harmonies on three of the album’s songs. “18 Cigarettes” features Eliza Neimi on cello.

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.