Jay Som never really left | Cover Story

Six years is a long time in music. Long enough for scenes to die a death, a new wave of songwriters to break through and for old favourites to fade quietly into the background. But Melina Duterte – better known as Jay Som – never really went anywhere. “People are like, oh my God, you’re back, but I feel like I never left,” she laughs. Her last album as Jay Som, 2019’s ‘Anak Ko’, was a hazy, expansive dream-pop record that pushed her far beyond her so-called bedroom pop beginnings. Since then, she’s been everywhere without always being centre stage: producing, co-writing, and lending her ear to friends’ projects, racking up credits with artists like Troye Sivan and beabadoobee. Most visibly, she became part of boygenius’ extended family, touring with the trio and contributing to their landmark 2023 album ‘The Record’ – the one that swept the Grammys with wins for Best Alternative Album, Best Rock Performance and Best Rock Song.

Still, the name Jay Som has been absent from posters and release schedules until now. Duterte describes those six years as a kind of informal education. “I try to think of it as school,” she says. “I didn’t go to college, but those six years were like audio engineering classes – YouTube University, and picking my friends’ brains.’

Tonight, we find her ready to take the stage again. At Edgefield, a sprawling hotel and concert venue on the edge of Portland, Oregon, Duterte steps out for an early 6.30pm slot on the first night of Lucy Dacus’ west coast tour. It’s a civilised affair: friends picnicking on the grass, couples stretched out on blankets with paper cups of wine – more summer garden party than rowdy rock show. She and her band move through a set of mostly new material from her upcoming album ‘Belong’, a record that opens Jay Som to new voices while digging deeper into her own. By the end, Sleater-Kinney are watching from the wings (because, well, Portland) and the crowd is obliging in chants of ‘Hell Yeah!’, a grin stretching across Duterte’s face as she walks off stage.

By the time the pandemic cancelled her 2020 touring plans, Duterte was already exhausted. The dream of being a full-time musician had quickly soured into months on the road, half a year at a time. “We were touring six months out of the year, like, for five years straight,” she says. “Sleeping on carpets and being handed drink tickets and being treated like shit… but at the end of the day, you’re with your friends, so it feels worth it. But it’s not very sustainable to be broke and touring. There’s no consistency. You don’t have any benefits. There’s literally nothing.”

Jay Som had grown fast, and with that came responsibility. “I was 22 and I had to learn how to be a boss. It’s crazy,” she says. “There was no handbook. You’re figuring it out as you go. And everyone looks to you to keep it all running.” By the time she released ‘Anak Ko’ in 2019, she was already burnt out – writing on the road, rushing into the studio, heading straight back into a van.

When everything stopped, it was the first real chance she’d had to breathe. Instead of chasing the next tour, Duterte spent time at home in California. “I got to be a girly in LA, form friendships with new people. When you’re on the road, you just don’t get to have that at all.”

When the brakes finally came on, Duterte slipped into something closer to a normal life. “I’ve been with my partner for a long time now, we got to become closer, and we have a dog that we adopted in 2020.

Sobriety was part of it too. She’s been sober seven and a half years now, with a yearly check-in where she decides if it still feels right. “It’s a constant thing of being like, OK, is this something that I want to keep doing? And so far, it’s worked for me.”

The reset gave her a chance to set boundaries she’d never had before. “Now I’m an adult. I know what I need. I need a hotel room. I need privacy. It’s okay to want those things,” she says. Touring again with Dacus this year, she’s noticed the shift: less chaos, more stability, a routine that keeps her sane.

It was also the first time in years she had space to simply sit at home and record. She splurged her government stimulus cheque on a vintage Neve console – “dream gear” she’d always wanted – and buried herself in manuals and online tutorials. Piece by piece, she built up the technical chops that would see her producing not just her own demos but eventually records for friends, peers and artists much further afield.

Once she was off the treadmill of touring, Duterte’s world widened. Offers to collaborate came steadily, and she had the time and headspace to say yes. In the last few years her fingerprints have been on records by Troye Sivan and beabadoobee, as well as a spotlight moment on the soundtrack for I Saw the TV Glow. And then there was boygenius. She joined their touring family and played on ‘The Record’, the album that swept the 2024 Grammys. “It just hasn’t been the same since for me,” she says of that connection.

Alongside the high-profile credits, she became the kind of producer younger musicians could lean on. “I have worked on so many albums with so many friends and just people that I really respect,” she says. “I try to be of service, especially if they’re younger artists, because I know how hard it is.”

The producer’s chair suited her: a chance to experiment and to play without the weight of being front and centre. “I feel like I know my strengths as a songwriter, but producing is where I still get to push myself,” she says. Her name may not have been on festival posters, but within the indie ecosystem, her influence spread far and wide.

When it came time to start work on a new Jay Som record, Duterte didn’t want to fall back into the same solitary process. “When you try something for the first time, you’re always going to hold some type of fear, but I had to come to terms with the fact that I had to let go of some control,” she says. “This record is essentially still me, but a lot of choices were made by friends who helped me, because I trusted them.”

That meant inviting others into the heart of Jay Som for the first time. Hayley Williams had been asking for years that the pair collaborate – the two met when Jay Som supported Paramore on the ‘After Laughter’ tour in 2018 – and it finally happened, with Williams adding soft harmonies to the drifting ‘Past Lives’. Steph Marziano, who Williams introduced her to, became another key partner, co-writing and co-producing during a stint in Nashville.

Sometimes the collaborations came together at the last minute. Jimmy Eat World’s Jim Adkins, a teenage hero, dropped into ‘Float’ just as the song was finished, lending his voice to its chorus: “Float, don’t fight / I’m not the same”. The result is a stone-cold emo banger and the record’s lead single. “I never thought that would actually happen,” she laughs of the collaboration. “It’s still kind of surreal.”

Elsewhere, friends like Lexi Vega of Mini Trees and João Gonzalez of Soft Glas (also in Jay Som, the band) added colour and texture.

The result is an album that feels bigger than anything she’s released before – eleven tracks that swing from the emo shimmer of ‘Casino Stars’ to the bruised intimacy of ‘Appointments’. For Duterte, collaboration wasn’t just about sharing the workload. It was a way of softening the edges of Jay Som itself, letting in new perspectives after years of doing it alone.

If ‘Anak Ko’ was hazy and inward, ‘Belong’ is louder, more direct, and unafraid to lean into the teenage obsessions Duterte once buried. “I turned 30 while I was making this record,” she says. “There is a portion of your 20s about being cool and hip and who can come up with the craziest ideas. But 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.”

There’s a portion of your 20s about being cool and hip and who can have the craziest ideas. As I’ve gotten older, I am more nostalgic about the music I experienced and I want to relive that.

Melina Duterte

That means pop-punk guitars and emo melodrama rubbing shoulders with shoegaze textures and bright, radio-friendly choruses. ‘Casino Stars’ is pure adolescent rush – “I’m on my hands and knees… just give me the keys” – while ‘D.H.’ has the scrappy, fuzzed-out feel of garage experiments. Elsewhere, ‘Appointments’ is hushed and sad-eyed, her voice floating over chiming guitars as she sings, “Missed your appointment / Your head on my lap / Changed your phone background / Smiling again”.

The pull isn’t nostalgia for its own sake. It’s reclamation. She grins when she talks about her “emo elders,” embracing the corniness of that word. For her, those choruses and riffs are part of the story of belonging, too.

The title of the record is no accident. For Duterte, ‘Belong’ is a way of asking the question she’s been circling for years – where do I fit? That search runs through friendships stretched thin by time and distance, through the grind of an industry that often feels extractive, and through her own experiences growing up as the queer daughter of Filipino immigrants in California.

“It’s always been in the back of my mind, like, what am I doing here?” she says. “Especially in an indie rock scene that’s very white, I would question how much space I had, or if I was just being tokenised.” Those doubts shaped the way she thought about Jay Som’s success, even at its peak. “There were times when I was like, is this sustainable? Do people actually like me? Do people just want to put me on a bill because I’m different? Those were the kinds of thoughts I had a lot.”

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There were times when I was like; do people actually like me? Do people just want to put me on a bill because I’m different?

Melina Duterte

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The album holds that tension without necessarily resolving it, moving between moments of intimacy and flashes of doubt. On the closing track ‘Want It All’, she frames it as a blunt question: “Do you really want to go? Will you hate what you will find?” It’s both personal and political – about love, ambition, and the fear that spaces you enter won’t ever fully be yours.

Rather than delivering a neat answer, Duterte lets the songs carry the contradictions: longing and distance, acceptance and rejection, confidence and fear. “I think a lot about my parents and their experience,” she says. “How they immigrated here and the racism they faced, and then me being born here, still feeling like I don’t really belong. That definitely makes its way into the record.”

‘Belong’ doesn’t tie those threads into resolution, but it makes them visible, and it claims space for them.

That search for where she fits plays out in the songs themselves. On opener ‘Cards on the Table’, Duterte faces down friendships that don’t always survive adulthood. “It’s about when you’re in your late twenties and early thirties and you realise not all of your friends are going to stick around,” she says. “Sometimes people grow apart, and sometimes you have to admit when you’ve been the one to let someone down.” The chorus says it without flinching: “Say it / You let me down / Say it / I let you down.”

‘Appointments’ pulls in close. She describes it as a song about rejection and embarrassment – the kind of private turmoil that lingers longer than it should. Over chiming guitars, her voice lands soft and almost conversational: “Missed your appointment / Your head on my lap / Changed your phone background / Smiling again.” “It’s that awkwardness when you care so much about someone and they don’t feel the same,” she says. “I wanted it to sound a bit like a Coldplay ballad, just very earnest.”

The record closes with ‘Want It All’, a song that spells out the push and pull of ambition and doubt. Built on a seesaw of repetition, Duterte sings, “Do you really want to go? Will you hate what you will find?” before the track unravels into a wall of noise and field recordings. Buried in the mix is a voice memo from her dad’s 60th birthday – laughter, karaoke, the hum of family life. “These are sounds that came from certain memories and moments that I really cherish,” she says. It’s both intimate and overwhelming, an ending that suggests the answer isn’t clarity but learning to carry the questions with you.

Out on the road again, Duterte looks looser. The grind that once left her burnt out has given way to a version of Jay Som that’s less anxious, more open, and sharper for the break. ‘Belong’ doesn’t try to provide all the answers, but it carries enough momentum to suggest she’s already moving forward. “I feel back,” she says. “I can clearly see the next five to ten years, and that feels really good.”

‘Belong’ by Jay Som will be released on October 10th. Pre-order the vinyl.