June McDoom / Lutalo

There is a hush most of us only knew as children, the warm drift between familiar household sounds and being carried to bed, a place that belongs to you and to some self you have not met yet. June McDoom’s debut full-length, Follow the Light, lives in that dream space and then keeps walking, slipping out of time and waking somewhere new, barely familiar enough to feel like home yet wholly your own.

She came up in a Jamaican household on the edge of the Florida Everglades, an existence built on extended family, communal care, bass, and harmonics. Her father, a carpenter and a student of sound, built his own speakers and kept three sound systems going across as many rooms. His low end would rise through her bedroom floor like some wayward cat while she lay above it with folk records, finding harmonies that were new and hers alone. Two musics in one room. Lushness as both past and premonition.

Made slowly and by hand with her longtime partner, Evan Wright, Follow the Light lays the harmony of folk over the rhythm of dub, with Dionne Warwick, Minnie Riperton, Pentangle, and the washed guitars of Cocteau Twins haunting its outer edges. Voice and guitar seek each other out first; then everything else is stacked across long days in the studio, with restraint maintained by design. The lead single, “Without You,” is the whole method surfacing, split open and sparkling like a geode in a creek bed. It is angelic heroics, and nothing less.

Opening the night, Lutalo’s highly visceral folk goes electric on The Academy, the Vermont multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and producer’s debut LP. On The Academy, Lutalo embraces a literary approach to self-referential songwriting, turning memories from their adolescence into impressionistic folk and rock compositions that are equal parts searing and vulnerable. With their unique baritone and finesse for lyrical world-building, Lutalo cuts to the bone—while only just beginning to reveal the depth of their artistry and vision.