Ducki Made the Prettiest Sad Record in Town — and They're Not Done

Somewhere between Big Thief's ache and Beach House's fog lives Ducki, the Fort Collins outfit that has spent the last year quietly making some of the most affecting music in Northern Colorado. The band — Signey Bowling, Brooke Apana, Will Erhart, Brian Zitti and Andy Poitras — trades in what they call "heavy ethereal folk evoking feelings of nostalgia and dreaminess," and the description undersells it. This is music that finds the exact frequency of a memory you'd rather not revisit and holds it, gently, until you do.

Their debut LP, The Duck, arrived in 2025 and functioned as a full-scale statement: introspective, metaphor-heavy lyrics wrapped in textured, melancholic instrumentation, with the DNA of Alex G audible in the way the songs wander before they land. They launched it, fittingly, at the Linden Street room now known as Sound Bar, with locals Sketches and Safekeeper in support — a hometown release show for a hometown band.

Here's why this matters beyond one good record: Ducki is the kind of band that only grows in a scene that actually catches its young. Bowling and company came up through the same downtown rooms, the same FoCoMX slots, the same welcoming Thursday-night crowds that the city keeps insisting are worth protecting. Ask them about it and the pride is uncomplicated. "The community here is so welcoming and supportive," the band told Colorado Public Radio's Local 303, adding that their FoCoMX set this spring "brought an overwhelming amount of love into our hearts."

That's not boilerplate. It's a thesis about how a small city grows big bands — by showing up for the melancholy folk record before anyone outside the county line has heard of you.

And there's more coming. Ducki has a three-song EP on the way this summer — titled We Likely Won't Speak Again — that promises to sharpen the debut's dreamy sprawl into something more concentrated. Three songs is a smart move for a band this good at atmosphere; it forces the discipline that a full-length can let you dodge, and it keeps the momentum from The Duck from cooling off.

Why keep an eye on a three-song EP from a band you might not know yet? Because this is the exact moment — after the well-reviewed debut, before the out-of-town press catches on — when a local scene decides whether it's going to keep a band or lose it to Denver, or worse, to nowhere. Fort Collins has a long, occasionally painful history of watching its best rooms change names and its best bands drift off. Ducki is a live test of whether the city's much-advertised support translates into the thing that actually sustains a band: people in the room, records in the bag, a reason to make the next one here.

So do the local thing. Find The Duck, sit with it after dark, and be ready when We Likely Won't Speak Again drops. A band this good at endings deserves an audience that refuses to let them have one.

Sources: Ducki, 'The Duck' — Album Review, BandWagon; The Local 303: June 2026 — CPR; Ducki Album Release feat. Sketches, Safekeeper — Downtown Fort Collins