June McDoom announces her debut album, Follow The Light, out 16 October via Jagjaguwar, her first new music for the label. With Follow The Light, June McDoom set out to create music that held space for all of the sounds and feelings that she loved. Not a reggae or dub record, not a folk record, but the harmony of one laid over the rhythm of the other.
She and her longtime partner, Evan Wright, created the songs slowly, by hand. Songcraft for the pair meant stacking parts over time, chasing texture, exercising restraint in their explorations and keeping things minimal on purpose. Dub and Wall of Sound influence the low end, with echoes of Dionne Warwick, Minnie Riperton, Pentangle and the washy, stellar guitars of Cocteau Twins’ Victorialand haunting the outer edges of what her sound shapeshifts into.
Today also sees the release of first single ‘Without You’, a song that embodies that painstaking approach behind the record. It began with live drums running straight through and slowly became something else entirely, until a dub bassline and a shoegaze shimmer met in the middle, in the last place you would think to look for either. The song is accompanied by a new video directed by Bing Cao and shot in Los Angeles and Woodland Hills.
June McDoom says, “I wrote ‘Without You’ about that feeling of realizing how meaningless life can feel without the person/people you love, and how you can feel like nothing without them around. I wanted the arrangement to reflect the emotional journey of that realization. The ending celebrates the awareness and commitment to never take that person for granted, because it’s never too late to change how you’ve been.”
WATCH/LISTEN
June grew up in a Jamaican household in South Florida, an existence built of strong extended family, communal care, bass and harmonics. Her father, a carpenter and student of sound all his own, built his own speakers and maintained no less than three sound systems across as many rooms. The bass from his solitary DJ sets would sneak its way through her bedroom floor, making itself at home like some wayward cat as she listened to folk records, finding harmonies that were new and special to her. She would find folk music on her own, somewhere between the cast recording of The Sound of Music and Simon and Garfunkel’s contributions to The Graduate. She did not mind being the only one listening to folk; the solitude afforded her the opportunity to fall in love with harmony first, before words, before anything else.
Yet and still, an elder also traveled a similar path: Her grandfather, Colin Smith, was a distinguished mento man who played banjo and guitar, built his own rumba boxes and worked hard to keep Jamaica’s oldest form of rural acoustic folk music and storytelling alive. Mento is the genre at the root of all of it – we have the form to thank for ska, rock steady, reggae, dub and everything that came after, and he is the one who put a guitar in her hands. An inheritance, a gift and a map.
As June layers these songs, this record, she is figuring out who she is in real time. There’s an entire lineage of selves that we all carry with us each day, and others that we will eventually meet. We are reaching back to those people and waving hello to them at the same time, along with the lineages of people who helped to shape us and get us here. A collection of people and things that don’t seem to go together, but we let them in anyway.
June McDoom
Follow The Light
Tracklist:
- Human Angel
- Without You
- Outside The Window
- Forever
- Get Out Of My Life
- Grandpa
- Dream Dub
- Memory
- Mountain
- Searching To Find
- Weaver
- Follow The Light
June McDoom Online:
