Today, the 24-year-old Minnesota-raised, Vermont-based artist Lutalo (they / them) shares “Summit Hill” ahead of their debut album The Academy. “Summit Hill” serves as a table setting for the album, representative of where Lutalo comes from and the spaces they’ve inhabited or orbited; a highly personalized analysis of the ever-hopeful yet often alienating American Dream.

Lutalo tells their stories with a modern folk voice a la Bob Dylan or King Krule, combed through with grunge guitar tones and a distinct deftness for melody and pace. The Academy is due on September 20 via Winspear, and they’ll hit the road with Nilüfer Yana this fall. Listen to “Summit Hill” and preorder The Academy here.

Summit Hill is the neighborhood in which the actual Academy –– the boarding school Lutalo attended on scholarship, the very same that F. Scott Fitzgerald attended -–– is located. Of “Summit Hill,” Lutalo says, “My best friend and I often walked that neighborhood in our childhood admiring the homes, as a dream that someday we’d be able to live in something as grand. We both grew up in low income households, yet both were accepted into one of the most expensive schools in the state on scholarship. His parents were both immigrants from Brazil, his father was a home painter. Most of his work was in that area for those [wealthier] people.” Just as in The Great Gatsby, “we were experiencing the same longing of acceptance, into a world of ease. Along with memories of a time where we had less responsibility, this song is about growing up with a heavy juxtaposition of lifestyles. And waiting for our time to be comfortable as well. Very typical American dream concept, personalized.”

Playing every instrument on The Academy, Lutalo crafts an album that serves as a potent backdrop to their literarily assembled character sketches and personal reckonings. Throughout, Lutalo’s exhibits an earnest and unsentimental curiosity about the world, dredging up empathy for anyone navigating their way through it.

According to The Guardian, Lutalo’s got a gift for crafting “fuzzed-out sharp edges reminiscent of TV On The Radio;” The FADER describes lead single “Ocean Swallows Him Whole” as “a pleasing turn into a surly form of post-punk complete with chugging bass lines and a striking synth rattle,” while the newsletter Inbox Infinity calls it “tastefully updated mid-2000s alt-rock.”

Named after the St. Paul, MN school they attended on scholarship — the same school F. Scott Fitzgerald attended and famously dissected throughout his work — The Academy  marks a period of re-invigoration and self-actualization for Lutalo. Diverging from the gentler sounds of last year’s AGAIN EP or their collab with bedroom pop phenom Claud on “Running” from earlier this year, The Academy is an altogether knottier and bloodier affair that traverses down fresh sonic avenues while maintaining Lutalo’s idiosyncratic voice. What results is a beguiling and visceral amalgam of rock, folk, post-punk, and soul paired with nuanced and humanizing observations on class disparity, privilege, and more informed by their time as an interloper into the elite world of The Academy.

Lutalo will be unveiling these new songs live on a series of UK festival dates before touring with Nilüfer Yanya in North America this fall. See all dates and info below.