Ducks Ltd., the Toronto jangle-pop band formerly known as Ducks Unlimited, have been on our radar since their excellent 2019 debut EP Get Bleak. Carpark re-released an expanded version of Get Bleak earlier this year, and now Ducks duo Tom McGreevy and Evan Lewis are getting ready to hit us with their official debut album Modern Fiction. Lead single “18 Cigarettes” made it onto our 5 Best Songs Of The Week list when it came out last month, and today, they’re sharing another new track called “How Lonely Are You?” featuring harmonies from their Carpark labelmates the Beths.

“This song is about personal connection in an environment that is hostile to it, and about friendships with people who are physically distant,” McGreevy explains in a statement. “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 song’s video, directed by John Smith, features McGreevy and Lewis on opposite sites of the US/Canada Niagara Falls border. “Me and Evan had not been in the same country for about 5 months when this video was shot,” McGreevy says. “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 US 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!”

Listen to “How Lonely Are You?” below.

Modern Fiction is out 10/1 on Carpark. Pre-order it here.