Melina Duterte, like many of us, found herself adrift at the turn of the decade. For Duterte, who records as Jay Som, worldwide quarantine-era malaise fed upon her own personal malaise. She had an artistic breakthrough in 2019’s quietly singular Anak Ko; then, lockdowns threw the career she’d been building as a solo artist into question. Her solution was six years of self-driven schooling: putting her stimulus check toward vintage gear, polling friends for engineering advice, and holing up in the deep archives of “YouTube University” (her words) to grow as a producer. Her goal was simple, yet elusive: to learn “what it felt like to be a musician without being a leader or being a solo project artist.”
In the intervening years, Duterte cut a record with Palehound’s El Kempner (2021’s Doomin’ Sun) and a Jay Som solo track made it onto A24’s Buzz Bin of a soundtrack for I Saw the TV Glow (2024). But mostly, she was behind the boards, producing and engineering for Hatchie, Beabadoobee, Jeff Tweedy, and biggest of all, boygenius’ The Record. She later toured with Lucy, Julien, and Phoebe, which was not only a dream gig—floating saunas! horseback riding!—but a glimpse into the group’s deeply collaborative writing process, which turned songs into communal belongings. If the past several years were Duterte’s school, the tour was her research capstone: learning what it felt like to be a musician and not need leaders at all.
On Belong, Duterte’s re-emergence as Jay Som, she exudes the confidence of those six years quietly but well spent. What the album loses in raw shaggy experimentalism of her last records, it gains in understated poise. The arrangements are pop-punk at bedroom-pop scale: fist-pumping in a small space. The lyrics are full of holding patterns just about to break, frustrations on the verge of coming to a head, and the tentative epiphanies of someone who’s only recently started to leave things behind: fading friendships, ill-fitting ambitions.
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