Live Review + Gallery | Searows @ Hoxton Hall, London

Searows

Hoxton Hall, London

21st October 2025

Photography by Izzy Reeve (@izzymayv)

Izzy Reeve

I’m a London-based music photographer and occasional writer and I love documenting gigs and people enjoying them. Having just moved back to London from Scotland, where I first started shooting concerts, I’m looking forward to exploring what the scene down south has to offer with CLUNK! From new acts to festivals, I love what clunk champions and I can’t wait to get started.

Indie folk artist Searows stuns London’s Hoxton Hall with an intimate showcase of unreleased music and fan favourites

Searows’ music is more mesmerising in person, leaving the Hoxton Hall audience stunned in an intimate one-off headline show. The queue was winding down the street at doors; London was ready for the melancholic yearning of Searows, the musical alias of Alec Duckart. An indie-folk musician with tender, heart-wrenching lyricism and immersive, haunting production, Searows knows how to subtly deliver a gut punch.

Amidst touring with fellow singer-songwriter Tamino for the U.K. and EU leg of his tour, Searows released ‘Dearly Missed’. The single is undeniably a Searows tune while showing off an exciting, crunchier side to his usual mellow sound. Clearly he’s raring to go for the new album, treating Hoxton Hall to a set studded with songs from the upcoming album ‘Death In The Business of Whaling’.

Opening up the stage was Hetta Falzon, with vulnerability and disarming soulful vocals she left an awed silence in her wake. Soaring through the space with only her piano, it’s unsurprising Falzon’s inspiration lies in the likes of Norah Jones and Olivia Dean. Singles ‘Freckles’ and ‘Sobering’ convey warm and candid emotion, and I can’t wait for ‘Belly Laugh’ and ‘The Rabbit Hole’ to be released.

This was the perfect lead into Searows’ headline, from band-backed ‘Junie’, ‘In Violet’, ‘Hunter’ ‘Photograph of Cyclone’ and ‘Kill What You Eat’ to the acoustic renditions of ‘Dirt’ and ‘Geese’, we nearly heard the whole unreleased album. The new music gives a new angle to his reserved vocals, centring him amongst rockier instrumentation driven by Remi on drums, Soph on guitar and Marlow on bass. Though he joked tuning takes up “a whole third” of his shows and that the crowd’s revered quiet was making him feel a bit nervous, his humility made the show even sweeter and his appreciation more earnest.

The intimate show felt really special, scattered with endearing moments from song debuts to a last-minute setlist addition of ‘Coming Clean’, where the front row lent a hand with recalling the lyrics (even if they turned out to be a remix of the original). It goes without saying that ‘House Song’ and ‘Keep the Rain’ were met with all the emotions, prompting both excitable gasps and tears from an audience ready to hear their favourite songs live.

Searows effortlessly harnesses existential sadness into some of the most heartbreaking music around, while also bringing together a loving community of people who cherished the moment on Tuesday night. I’ll be talking about this special Hoxton Hall night for a very long time, while re-listening to my favourites until the new album is released on January 23rd.