Belong

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.

There are songs in Jay Som’s older repertoire that sound like this: perhaps Turn Into’s “SLOW” shaken out of its dreampop daze, or Anak Ko’s “Superbike” if it really committed to those “Semi-Charmed Life” chords at the beginning. There are also many such songs in many other people’s repertoires—and that’s neither an accident nor an insult. “I want to sound like other people,” Duterte recently told Rolling Stone. And she meant it emphatically, breaking down the exact inspirational parameters of each track on the album: Drake and Hovvdy (“Cards on the Table”) Broken Social Scene and Alex G (“Casino Stars”), or Cloud Nothings (“Float,” originally titled “Cloud Nothings Idea.”) Hearing her break this down is startling: not because she wants to be like the people on her playlist (who among us), but because she’s passed her influences so thoroughly through the filter of her own songwriting voice that they’re barely detectable.

Of course, it’s easier to hear those influences when you can hear their actual voices. The record isn’t Duterte’s first with collaborators—Laetitia Tamko of Vagabon, Taylor Vick of Boy Scouts, and Annie Truscott of Chastity Belt played on Anak Ko—but it’s the first time she’s brought in guest vocalists. “Float” has a last-minute emo assist by Jimmy Eat World’s Jim Adkins, who locks in his harmony with the same kind of force that made Duterte brick her Bleed American CD back in the day. Duterte met an equally starstruck Hayley Williams while opening for Paramore’s After Laughter tour, and only years later did she realize Williams was serious all those years when she begged Duterte to let her do a feature. On “Past Lives,” Williams’ presence turns the track into a perfect mirror of Duterte’s lyrics: punctuating “I’m stuck in the mud, I’m spiraling” with overdriven distortion and Williams’ harmonies whirling all over the scale.

Then, on the back half of the album, Duterte absorbs all these influences into herself. She sequenced “Past Lives” as a quasi-Side B opener, and it leads into the clear-minded fury of “D.H.,” where Duterte’s own assured harmonies ring out. The final few tracks are her newest and most restless material. “Meander / Sprouting Wings” juxtaposes two fragments against each other: one an underwater wade through untuned piano and heavy vocoding, and the other a folky hymn with an arrangement that ticks like a wonky clock. It’s like Duterte playing with musical ideas for solely her own benefit. Then, on the plaintive, unhurried “A Million Reasons Why,” she expands that audience to another: the subject of the song, to whom she’s so wordlessly connected that “it’s hard to sleep alone when you’re not at home.”

The final track is the standout: a grungy song about being torn apart by warring ambitions. “You want to leave,” she sings,“You want it all/You want to leave.” Unlike the anthems on the album’s first half, there’s neither a musical nor lyrical breakthrough, just the riff and refrain driving deeper and deeper. Looming in the subtext are all the anxieties Duterte’s spoken about: going from solo artist to producer back to solo artist, wondering what’s the tangent and what’s the career. But looming even larger is the rest of the record: proof that after cultivating relationships and music-community roots for years, eventually those connections will help you grow into something new.