After years behind the boards, Melina Duterte reclaims her voice with an album that trades bedroom solitude for collective clarity.
By the time the world went still in 2020, Melina Duterte—better known as Jay Som—had already begun to question what it meant to be an artist alone. Coming off the quiet triumph of Anak Ko, she found herself adrift in the same suspended time the rest of us were, watching the momentum of her singular, self-built career dissolve into static. Instead of retreating, she went back to school—her own version of it, anyway. A stimulus check became a ticket to vintage gear; YouTube tutorials and friends’ DMs replaced formal instruction. Her mission was modest but radical: to learn how to make music without centering herself in it.
Over the next six years, Duterte submerged herself in collaboration. She recorded Doomin’ Sun with El Kempner of Palehound, slipped a solo track onto A24’s I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack, and quietly built a résumé as one of indie rock’s most intuitive producers. Her fingerprints are on Hatchie’s dreamscapes, Beabadoobee’s diaristic pop, Jeff Tweedy’s homespun recordings, and—most visibly—boygenius’ The Record. When she joined Lucy, Julien, and Phoebe on tour, she experienced a kind of creative communion she’d been chasing for years: music that didn’t need a leader, only trust.
Belong, her first Jay Som album in half a decade, is the sound of that lesson crystallizing. Gone is the gauzy insularity of Turn Into or the tape-warped glow of Anak Ko; in its place is something more deliberate, more spacious, more assured. The production feels both airier and tighter, bedroom-pop instincts retooled for pop-punk precision. Where her early work wandered through dreamlike melancholy, Belong feels awake—its songs teeter on the edge of release, full of holding patterns and small combustions. Duterte’s writing has always been elliptical, but here it’s taut with the tension of change: the sound of someone standing in a doorway, not sure whether to leave or stay.
That in-between state defines Belong’s best moments. On “Cards on the Table,” Duterte leans into her Hovvdy and Drake influences, turning a simple backbeat into something quietly devastating. “Casino Stars” flickers like an Alex G deep cut filtered through You Forgot It in People-era Broken Social Scene—messy, warm, communal. When she sings about friendship decay or ambitions that don’t fit anymore, the words land like aftershocks rather than confessions. She once said, half-joking, “I want to sound like other people.” What’s striking about Belong is that she finally does—and in doing so, she sounds more like herself than ever.
The album’s second half folds her recent experiences back into her own orbit. “Float” features Jimmy Eat World’s Jim Adkins, whose weathered harmony carries the thrill of teenage fandom made full-circle. “Past Lives,” with Hayley Williams, channels the dizzy feedback loop of mutual admiration into something cathartic and jagged—Williams’ harmonies swirl around Duterte’s lyrics like a mirror turning in on itself. But the collaborators don’t overshadow her; they clarify her intent. The deeper Belong gets, the more it feels like Duterte is absorbing everything she’s learned from others into a renewed, self-contained voice.
“D.H.” pulses with a new kind of confidence, her harmonies stacked like bricks. “Meander / Sprouting Wings” toys with structure, splitting between glitchy vocoder drift and tender acoustic reverie. By the time she reaches “A Million Reasons Why,” the album’s quietest song, she’s let go of the need to perform catharsis at all—just a single thought, lingering in open air.
The closer, “You Want to Leave,” returns to the fuzzed-out urgency of her earliest recordings but refuses the easy lift-off of an anthem. “You want to leave / You want it all,” she sings, the words collapsing into themselves as if caught between two different versions of her career. It’s a song about indecision that somehow sounds like resolve.
Across Belong, Duterte doesn’t so much rebuild Jay Som as she redefines what belonging to her own music means. After years of dissolving into other artists’ sounds, she’s made an album that thrives on porousness—where identity is less about control than connection. In letting go of the need to lead, Melina Duterte finds a new kind of authorship: the art of listening, even to herself.
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