INTERVIEW: Jay Som releases first album in six years 'Belong': "I'm definitely more self aware. I know what I want and what I need from myself and from other people"
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Daniel Topete
Published: 10 October 2025
Los Angeles musician Melina Duterte has been releasing music under the name Jay Som for over a decade, and after a period of silence for the project, today she returns with her first album in six years, Belong.
That’s not to suggest Duterte herself hung up her creativity and moved away from music, she just transitioned into practically the other side of the table. After buying and learning how to operate a a vintage Neve console during the covid lockdowns, she achieved huge success as a producer and collaborator, working with Troye Sivan and beabadoobee and winning a Grammy for her work on The Record by boygenius.
When she knew it was time to revisit the Jay Som project, she approached it with a mix of looking back, but also embracing new approaches, Previously an artist who created everything herself in her own home studio, for Belong Duterte opened her creativity to her friends and colleagues, who she wrote and produced these songs with her, including Paramore’s Hayley Williams.
For the soundscape of Belong, Duterte looked into her past. Growing up with rock, pop punk and emo, it is these sounds that dominate the album. This is not however a wistful, nostalgic recreation of youth, but a source of inspiration for Duterte “As I’ve gotten older, I am more nostalgic about the music I experienced and want to relive that—by being inspired by that music,” she says.
Belong definitely embraces that lo-fi, bedroom pop feel of the early 2000s, but Duterte adds in synths, pop and left of field moments that clearly reimagines the iconic sound Duterte loves.
‘Cards On The Table’ opens the album and in many ways it is a sonic outlier, with an electronic beat and swirls and jabs of synths lending the song a gorgeous, dreamy pop feel. Lyrically it tells a slightly darker story as Duterte sings of a relationship that has turned ugly. ‘Paved your path, it’s what you deserve / Rot in the backseat of your life…say it, you let me down.”
‘Float’, which features Jim Adkins and is the first song Duterte wrote for the album, is a peppy guitar indie pop that is almost a declaration of the who she is as an artist now - ‘I’m not the same’ - while ‘Appointments’ takes guitar pop to the other end of the scale, as a gentle ballad reflecting on love and past relationships.
Paramore’s Hayley Williams features on ‘Past Lives’, which has a classic 2000s indie sound, with somnolent drum beats that gradually become larger as the song progresses, alongside the guitar that moves into electric squeals. Duterte and Williams’ vocals blend together perfectly as they sing of restarting after a period of shutting yourself off, turning the concept of spiralling out of control around by declaring the rebirth is ‘spiralling up’.
Duterte becomes more experimental as the album draws to a close. ‘Meander/Sprouting Wings’ has a wonky piano supporting distorted vocals before rapidly changing path in the second half of the song with electronic pings giving way to acoustic guitar and an almost disconnected vocal from Duterte. It is followed by ‘A Million Reasons Why’ which features high pitched vocals against an woozy electronica background.
The album ends on ‘Want It All’ that begins with a blurring, underwater feel with hints of 1980s post punk in its sound., before electric guitars kick in and the song goes down a largely instrumental route before transforming in the end to gentle swirls of music against sounds of talking and laughing that gives it an almost lullaby feel, before the album closes entirely.
Belong is an album that declares Jay Som is back, and it is with a sound that is instantly familiar but reflects her growth and life experiences during the six years since her last album Anak Ko. Reflective, warm, comforting and intriguing, it is an album that warrants full immersion to appreciate its splendour to the full. We recently sat down with Duterte to chat more about the creation of Belong.
Hi Melina! It is so delicious to chat with you, because this album Belong, I have not stopped playing it. It is really so beautiful. So first of all, congratulations, it's really, really beautiful.
Really? Thank you so much!
It plays out like this whole universe. And it brings me back, not necessarily to a moment in time, but a feeling of coming of age. And no matter when someone grew up or came of age, they're going to feel that tug. Was that intentional, and if so, how did you go about creating that?
Thank you. It definitely was intentional. It's funny, my partner just showed the album to one of their friends yesterday and they were like ‘Oh my God. Like, this sounds so nostalgic, but it also sounds new, and it sounds like something I've heard before, and I can reference so many things, but it doesn't feel like a like a rip off.’ And I was like, yeah, that's exactly what I was going for. That's why I make music, I'm just trying to make music that I really love and am inspired by, I want to sound like other people. The next logical step for me making this record was going into the alternative rock route, and I'm glad I did, because it was really fun to experiment with that and to get Jim Adkins from Jimmy Eat World and Hayley Williams to sing was kind of like the stamp of approval on it.
Oh, that's so beautiful. You've got this kind of spiked teapot quality to your music, it’s the only way I can describe it. It's warm, but it's really heady. Going into this collection was there a particular book or film or lyric or moment that really cemented ‘I need to make a whole album that does this for me’?
One thing that's coming up a lot is all the TV shows I grew up watching. I was a kid during the early 2000s so that's where the Paramore and Jimmy Eat World inspiration comes from, but on top of that, I was really into that show, The OC. I was talking about how the music supervisors on all of these the early 2000s shows were just so good at crafting a soundtrack for certain scenes. It's stuck with me since then. Having Death Cab for Cutie on The OC was huge for me and even, Skins, the original UK version, I base a lot of my music taste off of that. One of the seasons the music supervisor had Grouper in a soundtrack in one of the episodes.
Combining visual elements and genre and mixing it so that it feels correct for the scene is really inspirational for me, because that's what production is as well. It's like you're setting a scene with lyrics and themes, but sonically you're doing the same thing. Every time I start a song, I usually know exactly where I want it to head towards.I'll be like, okay, this is my Backstreet Boys song. The song ‘Drop A’ I knew immediately there was a corny boy band thing going on and I wanted to run with it.
Speaking of visuals, I cannot get past the song ‘Float’, it is incredible. But also the music video, let's talk about that. Oh, good. Did you always see it when you were writing the song? Did you see it playing out in your head?
Actually, yeah. And I've never, ever had that experience or feeling before. As I was tracking and writing it, I just kept seeing things visually in my head, and I wrote it down in my notes app, and it's still there. I've never had that before for any albums. For every album, I'm just like, whatever works, works. But for this one, I was like, I keep seeing a house show and dancing and people, all different types of people, not just young, hot people. What kept coming through was the nostalgia factor of it all. I was reminiscing back to the time when I'd be watching MTV all the time, and VH1 before I went to school, back when MTV played music videos all the time. I remember growing up seeing all of these amazing, really well thought out and produced music videos that were kind of freaky. I feel like the early 2000s had a lot of those creative music videos, and I wanted to to see what could happen with the video for ‘Float’. Nina, the director, was just super sweet and super willing to go for it. It was really fun.
It's really cool. And again, it pulls on that notion of it's everyone's coming of age. I think we come of age consistently in our lives, there's always going to be these moments where our body grinds to a halt for a hot second, and we just solidify in that peace, and then we keep going. For me, that's what plays out in that video, as well as the song. We continue to be at that house party, we continue to be vulnerable, we continue to try and be the adult, no matter where we're at.
Yes, and she really touched on those themes for the music video Even with the older people from Craigslist, the LA actors that I specifically asked for, I really wanted that to be a priority in the music video, because it matches the song. You're holding on to different past versions of yourself and and trying to move forward, but it's all about the fear of the unknown. When you move throughout this world, it's scary to grow up, and I think just seeing people of all ages in the video, having their own little story, was really special and really cool. Everyone's trying to fit in in their own weird way.
And that’s all we do for our whole lives! I want to talk to you a little bit about the way you've book ended the album with ‘Cards On The Table’ at the beginning and ‘Want It All’ at the end. There's declarations and then doubts, which I love and I feel that goes through the whole album like a sort of statement. When you were going about getting the track listing, how did those two secure their spots?
Actually, the track listing, the sequencing day was super easy. Joelle Gonzalez, one of the co-producer on the record, helped me with that, and it was super, super fast. We did in like five minutes! I was expressing that I really loved Radiohead’s album In Rainbows, and we kind of just modelled it after that. I like thinking about track listing and sequencing when I'm producing for other people, I love to be heady about it. But for my own stuff, I just want to move on and see if it works. That was the first idea, and we rolled with it.
Now that I've spent time listening to the record, really like the flow of it all. It's kind of strange how there's a lot of guitars in the first half, and it kind of gets a little darker and darker and a little weirder. Even with ‘Cards On The Table’ starting off the album as an electronic song, and it’s very much pointing the finger at someone, and then ‘Want It All’ is very much pointing it at myself and grappling with the fact that we're all flawed human beings. We really want so much for ourselves, to a certain degree where it becomes kind of toxic and overwhelming
You said that you find it hard to do that sequencing for yourself. Does that come from a place of it's very difficult to be objective on your own work, as opposed to when you're working on someone else's?
Oh, 100%. I'm sure you feel the same way, if you write and whatnot. We're our toughest critics, and we're also our own worst enemies. Over thinking is a creative killer and it's really, really hard to make art for yourself and put it out in the world. That's why I had a bunch of people working on this record and helping me start the train with writing and concepts and sounds. For me, and I'm sure a lot of people feel this way, the literal hardest part is just sitting down and doing the first five minutes of it, because you get so distracted. You have your phone, or you're like I could clean right now, or I could hang out with my friend or my dog. And the next thing, you know, it's hours later, and you haven't done anything, and that kind of rolls into a couple of months and then years, and that's why projects get delayed.
Coming back and doing this album, did it feel like coming back to yourself as an artist, or was it something very new, because you had such a break. How was it coming back into that solo sphere?
It was honestly a bit scary. I've been saying this lately to friends, I feel like a new artist, genuinely, because six years is a pretty long time. It didn't feel like that for me, but that's a very long time to take a break as an indie artist right now. I feel like I'm in completely different environment. Social media, the algorithm is bonkers. I'm always like, what is going on? Should I give up? Even with recording and writing, I was like, oh my God, can I do this? Slowly, the confidence came back, and it felt like riding a bike again, I felt like I was finding myself again. I did this before I could do it again. I'm a little better at feeling confident about my choices and ideas. I can technically do things faster as well, but I never got to experiment with my own music with all of the knowledge I picked up from working with other people. It was a lot of surprises and also confusion and experimentation throughout the entire process from beginning to the end.
Dropping straight back into the deep end, do you think that actually helped you, particularly with the themes of this album, that precipice of adulthood, that precipice of the next part, the fear?
Oh, for sure. The fear for sure came up and I'm 31 now. I'm not saying that in a way where I'm saying I'm old or I'm wise beyond my years, but I feel like I'm at a point in my adulthood where I'm definitely more self aware. I know what I want and what I need from myself and from other people, but there's always space to grow from that and learn and be flexible onlife in general.
It naturally came up throughout the break, and I got therapy during that time, and I've been sober from alcohol during that time as well. I also got to sit down and be a little bit more domestic with my partner and my dog and form newer friendships. I actually got to stay consistent and reflect on how I treat people and sit down with myself. Maybe that's just what it's like to enter your 30s.
Lastly, before I have to leave you, if there was one track on this album where you at 31 truly belong, which one do you think it is?
I feel like I'm at ‘Float’ right now. Sometimes it changes, but I feel like I'm at ‘Float’ because it makes me think of the world and people that I love, and friends and strangers. I feel like there's an energy to it that feels universal, and that's always the kind of energy that I'm trying to give out with the music that I make. It makes me feel that way. It makes me feel like a better person.
Belong is out now via Lucky Number. You can buy and stream here.
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