NYC-based songwriter June McDoom is revealing her debut single today, which arrives through Temporary Residence Ltd. and alongside a visual that matches the track’s delicate textures. “The City” is a soft mediation on personal change and familial history, and how the two play into each other. The hazy, minimal, and lightly psychedelic instrumentation pairs well with McDoom’s nearly whispered vocals—distancing herself here from her experience as a trained jazz singer—as the five-minute track progresses.
“‘The City’ was a song I wrote during college at a time when I was having a lot of realizations about who I was and how much all the family and friendships of my life had shaped me,” she explains. “I was thinking a lot about my ancestry, the strong matriarchs of my family, and the impact and courage it took for my entire extended family to uproot from Jamaica and move to NYC in the 1970s.”
In aiming to match those lyrical themes, the music video’s director, Ximena Prieto, angled “to honor transience in all its bittersweetness. The video is based on the essence of ‘The City,’” she continues, “concerning the specific sensation of accepting significant change—appreciating what has come, acknowledging the inevitability that fully embracing something new brings loss as well, and what is precious is precious to us in part because it is ephemeral.”
Of the technical aspects to the video, she adds, “This is a project we begun pre-pandemic, but as we continued to edit during the last year this feeling of estrangement from what once was resonated potently—yearning for people or situations with all our being and knowing some things can never be quite the same, while realizing that those loved ones and experiences are somehow always with us, we carry them, serving as caretakers of their impact on us recalling them with affection and sustaining them within our hearts as we step into a new reality.”
Watch the clip below.
