The Chicago trio Black Duck — bassist and guitarist Douglas McCombs, guitarist Bill MacKay and drummer Charles Rumback — have joined Basque musician Elena Setién for a collaborative debut. Black Duck With Elena Setién is out August 28th via Thrill Jockey, announced today with lead single Land of the Many Eyes.
The four met only in early 2025, on a run of Spanish shows where they kept sitting in on one another’s sets. “This record for me, is a prolongation of that tour together in Spain,” Setién says. “We combined our sets and every night new improvisations evolved. So we took that same freshness to the studio.” She wrote Land of the Many Eyes with Indigenous peoples in mind — the helplessness of the vulnerable against those in power — and found it gained resonance in Chicago, whose original Potawatomi name, shikaakwa, moved her. “Elena’s song has such a natural feel,” Rumback says. “It made us all feel like a band instantly.”
They recorded a few months later at Chicago’s Palisade studio with Nick Broste. “At this point we have all probably recorded multiple projects with him in different bands, so it was a shared language that let us move fast,” Rumback adds. Setién calls Broste a sound engineer who makes music with the band, treating sound itself as an instrument. Overdubs layer depth onto the freewheeling pieces without dimming the electric charge of four people playing in a room.
The pairing fits. Black Duck have spent years as collaborators — McCombs through Tortoise and Brokeback, all three crossing paths with Ryley Walker and Bill Callahan; Setién has played alongside Steve Gunn, Mary Lattimore and Glenn Kotche. We reviewed Black Duck’s self-titled debut in 2023, and have followed Elena Setién from In This Short Life to last year’s Asking video.
Listen to Land of the Many Eyes below.
Black Duck With Elena Setién (28th August 2025) Thrill Jockey
Stream: https://push.fm/fl/land-of-the-many-eyes
Pre-Order the album: https://blackduck.bandcamp.com/album/black-duck-with-elena-seti-n