Live at Brudenell Social Club in Leeds: June McDoom

"The drum plumes and echoey patter, recall Kate Bush. It's both jaunty and fierce. Her true inner spirit guides her away from brutal forces. She searches for freedom, for brightness." - Stereogum on “Get Out Of My Life”

June McDoom releases ‘Human Angel’, the final single from her forthcoming debut album Follow The Light, out this Friday via Jagjaguwar.

Originally written as a folk song, ‘Human Angel’ grew into one of June’s first experiments blending folk with reggae instrumentation, pairing nylon guitar and a rhythm inspired by Eek-A-Mouse overlapped with dreamy vocals, chiming textures and otherworldly synth flourishes.

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.