June McDoom Makes Folk Music With the Bass Turned Up

On her debut album, Follow the Light, the New York songwriter brings the Jamaican records she grew up with into the traditions that she learned to love on her own

The leaves are a vibrant mix of greens and auburn, casting a warm glow over Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where I meet singer-songwriter June McDoom at her studio. The space, on a scenic block near the water, looks something like a dentist’s office. McDoom shares it with musician Nick Hakim and her partner, Evan Wright; dance music from next door bleeds into the room where they record drums and vocals. “Yeah, it’s definitely a New York situation,” she says.

Her self-titled debut EP, released in 2022, introduced her hushed brand of folk to indie rock spaces. Her recently released debut album, Follow the Light, brings the deep bass of Jamaican dub into McDoom’s intimate productions. McDoom says she knew the sound she was after before she understood what her debut album would say. She imagined the Jamaican records she grew up hearing, plus the harmonies she loved in Joni Mitchell and Judee Sill.

“I knew that before the project started, I wanted to do some sort of fusion between the genres, but I wasn’t really sure how,” she says. “And that was what the album became, just a puzzling process of me trying to put together my different influences.”

Born Alyssa McDoom, she grew up in Florida, where her parents, who moved from Jamaica to the U.S. as children, filled the house with Jamaican music. Her father, a carpenter, built speaker boxes and kept multiple DJ setups around the house.

“They would just build the biggest speakers and see how loud they could get,” she says. She wonders whether his fascination with sound helped shape her own. “I’m naturally, for some reason, attracted to the way that something is recorded, and I listen for it in records. I don’t know why. It could be the fact that my dad was DJing.”

She discovered other kinds of music through films like The Sound of Music and The Graduate. Her family supported her, even when her tastes surprised them; school could be lonelier. “In school, I didn’t have that many friends. I didn’t have a community of musicians until college that I could talk to about music. And I kind of found folk music on my own.”

Editor’s picks

Returning to Alton Ellis records while developing her own music, she heard new possibilities in something familiar. “I didn’t really know the term rock steady until two years ago,” she says. “I knew the music, but I didn’t know the terminology of the genre.”

McDoom studied voice in New York, initially focusing on jazz. She graduated in 2019, having begun writing the songs for her first EP. She and Wright taught themselves how to record.

“I wanted the record to feel kind of handmade even if it sounded not-perfect,” she says. “I didn’t want it to be like I have my first album and I’m going to change my process completely and make my music sound differently, because I’m not really trying to make it sound perfect. I’m just trying to see how I can grow and see how my music can evolve.”

There was pressure, too, in trying to honor the musicians she loved. “A lot of the artists that I listened to are underground artists that never really had much of a career beyond making a couple projects. And they had lives where they did music but also did other things. I felt a lot of pressure to honor those things, and that made it really hard.”

She did want to change her approach to lyrics. On the EP, the excitement of recording had sometimes carried her past words she wasn’t satisfied with. “So with the album, I just made a really strict rule that I wanted to be really intentional about the lyrics and feel really strong about them before any other process.”

Related Content

McDoom produces her own projects. She and Wright write separately, then help with each other’s recordings. “So I’ll be like, ‘I really want this bass line,’ and I sing it and then he’ll play it. We understand each other kind of well. We’ve been together for 10 years, so we’ve been growing slowly together, and I feel like we have this pretty good chemistry now.”

Around us, an eight-track reel-to-reel sits above a pair of Ampex preamps, their meters glowing orange. There’s a Roland Space Echo RE-201 on the rack beside it, with a mess of cables trailing down to the wooden floor. A microphone lies across the Sound Workshop mixing desk, and a Roland Jupiter-8 synthesizer is reflected in the studio window. The sill holds a beat-up VHS copy of Boogie Nights alongside a jar of tools. Above the window, a program for D’Angelo’s celebration of life is propped between a record sleeve and two little Sony speakers.

“I think because we went to music school, it kind of messed us up,” she says. “So when we’re working together, we’re pretty technical and we’re pretty analytical.” The two can spend an hour trying to find a particular microphone sound. “We both are in love with finding textures with recording, which takes time.”

She works with tape and a computer, finding uses for old preamps and digital reverb. “I feel like digital has texture too,” she says. “If I’m adding a violin part, should we record it and should it be brighter or should it sound darker and have a lot of reverb on it? I feel like that’s a part of the process that I’m really excited to think about.”

Her family also helped make the record. On “Grandpa,” she brings in her grandfather, who plays banjo and guitar in a band devoted to mento, a form of Jamaican folk music. She considered covering an older song before writing something for him herself.

“Growing up, I would go and see them play at parties and stuff,” she says. “But I felt kind of removed because again, I didn’t fully embrace Jamaican music until recently, and now I’m just like, ‘He’s the coolest person ever. I really want to be in his band.’”

He had played at her college senior recital, but this collaboration happened remotely. “My dad recorded his vocal on his iPhone and sent it to me,” she says. By the time we speak, she has also filmed a version of “Get Out of My Life” with her grandfather’s band.

That song came from a less welcoming relationship. Moving to New York, she had expected to find friends who understood her. “And I was making friends with people that reminded me of the people that I was around when I was a kid that I could tell didn’t really actually like me, and I was kind of the outcast again.”

The song’s title carries some relief. “It’s kind of freeing to realize that someone’s not for you, and it doesn’t have to be this negative, ‘Fuck you, you suck,’” she says. “It was just a message for myself that I don’t need to hold onto people in my life that don’t accept me completely…. The things that are right for you are when you are around people where you can just completely explore and be free. I didn’t even realize I wanted to say that with this record, but all the songs ended up being about that.”

“Without You” is a love song, whatever its title might suggest. “I can’t live without this person because I’ve realized how important they are to my life,” she says, describing the song’s sentiment.

She hears something similar in Judee Sill’s “Emerald River Dance,” which she has covered. “That song feels really sad, but it’s actually a similar sort of message where she’s talking about the pain of life and how you have to experience pain to understand the beauty of life,” she says. “But she says it in the most beautiful way, and she’s referencing nature and grass growing through concrete and stuff.”

She came to understand her album more fully after finishing it. “Even while I was working on it, I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, this is a positive record about finding yourself.’ I still wasn’t even really thinking about it until the record was done and then I could really take in what I made.”

That discovery extended to the sound. “Even with the sound of the record, I feel like it became this dreamy sort of sound that I didn’t intentionally try and do.”

On “Follow the Light,” a reggae groove gives way to a choral passage written by a friend. The song began with an image of McDoom on a dark, rainy road, following a light. Its encouragement has practical applications. “If you’re having a really hard day, just think about the family member that you really want to call that always gives you really good advice. Just put that stuff in front of you instead of the thing that’s driving you crazy.”

Trending Stories

Making the record required a similar trust in what mattered to her. “I’m trying to find myself through my music by including different parts of myself. I hope to encourage people to do that too, because we’re just living in this crazy echo chamber of content. I think people are confused. I’m confused.”

She knows the temptation to make something whose success seems easier to predict. With Follow the Light, she let herself find out what would happen. “I just made it because I thought it could be a special thing for people to hear,” she says. “I wasn’t sure how it would turn out.”