Black Duck and Elena Setién have shared Funeral in My Brain, the final single from their collaborative debut Black Duck with Elena Setién, out August 28th via Thrill Jockey. The lyrics come from Emily Dickinson’s 1862 poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.”
“This one is a funeral, but a surrealistic one in some way,” Setién says. “In a sense, as a performer, and as a listener, I lose fear of death and just embrace it.” She set Dickinson to music before, on her 2022 album Unfamiliar Minds. Her other solo records include Twelve Sisters and Another Kind of Revolution; she also scored the Basque-language TV series Altsasu with Xabier Erkizia.
Black Duck are Douglas McCombs, Bill MacKay and Charles Rumback. The four met on tour in Spain in early 2025 and recorded the album at Palisade Studio in Chicago with engineer Nick Broste. “That energy is what shaped the direction of the music heading into these sessions,” Rumback says.
Funeral in My Brain follows lead single Land of the Many Eyes, which we covered when the album was announced in June. Black Duck play Chicago’s Sound & Gravity Festival on September 6th.
We reviewed Black Duck’s self-titled debut back in 2023 and, most recently, highlighted Setién’s Moonlit Reveries (2024), a collaboration with Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche.
Black Duck with Elena Setién (28th August) Thrill Jockey
Pre-Order the album: https://blackduck.bandcamp.com/album/black-duck-with-elena-seti-n