Six years since her last solo record, Jay Som – the moniker of Melina Duterte – returns with Belong, a record that’s both introspective and unguardedly communal. Having spent the years between releases collaborating with artists like Boygenius, Hayley Williams, and Mini Trees, she’s emerged from the background to craft something both intimate and widescreen.
Across Belong, Jay Som grapples with self-doubt, belonging, and the blurred edges between personal reflection and shared experience. It’s an album that honours her DIY roots – she still mixes and retracks everything herself – but embraces the joy of collaboration, letting new voices and friendships infuse the project with warmth.
Produced largely from her home studio in Los Angeles and finished between sessions in Philadelphia, Belong carries the freedom of an artist making peace with her past and the chaos of her creative mind, blended with a decade of industry experience.
“I come from a time – I feel so old now – where you just released stuff on Bandcamp or SoundCloud, and you named your price, and I felt connected to the community that would come out of releasing music that way. But now it feels a little different. It’s all about pre-saves, and it’s a lot of ‘pay attention to me now’ every single day. I’m still getting used to this process and I’ve been doing a lot press recently, so I’ve been talking a lot about the record, and now I’m ready to let it go.”
Below, Jay Som shares the five inspirations that brought Belong to life, from teenage nostalgia and serendipitous visuals to rediscovering where (and with whom) she feels most at home.
Belong and the search for home
The word Belong first appeared to Jay Som as a feeling before it became the title. “It just kept coming up,” she says. “I truly don’t have a story about that, but there’s something about the word ‘belong’ that kept reappearing during the record tracking process. Maybe internally or subconsciously, I’m always asking myself the question: where do I belong here? Do I want to belong? Am I welcome in the space? Do I want to be welcome?” It captured the central question that had lingered through her twenties: where, and with whom, does she truly fit?
That curiosity threads through the album’s lyrics, which dwell on the complexities of closeness and solitude. Returning to solo work after years of collaboration brought its own sense of unease. “I pull a lot of inspiration from the people that I work with, and it took a while to find my voice again,” she says. “That’s why I had so many co-producers on Belong, because I felt like I needed help.”
Through Belong, she embraces the in-between; neither isolated nor fully entwined. The title isn’t about finding a fixed place, but about accepting the movement between them. “I think I was just trying to be honest with myself,” she says. “I’d been experiencing some interpersonal conflict in platonic relationships and working relationships, and I’m always trying to figure out why and how things went down, and what my role was in those situations, so it’s a lot of pointing the finger, but then pointing it back at myself.”
Accidental iPhone photo bursts
The album’s cover art began as a mistake. “I was renewing my passport and accidentally took this burst of photos on my iPhone,” Jay Som laughs. “I was against a white wall, and there was something kind of vibey about the movement.” Something about the images caught her attention: the blur, the imperfection, the feeling of existing between moments.
She sent them to her friend and long-time collaborator Sab Mai of No Vacation, who transformed them into the moody, filmic visuals that define Belong’s visuals. “Sab totally got it,” she says. “She printed them out and distorted them so they felt like stills from an old VHS tape.” The end result is a portrait that feels both intimate and detached, like a memory half-remembered.
Her brother, Boygenius & early 2000s rock
If Belong sounds like it’s in conversation with the early 2000s, that’s no coincidence. When asked what she was listening to while making this record, Jay Som immediately shouts out Jimmy Eat World and Paramore. The record nods to her teenage years spent playing guitar in her bedroom and arguing with her brother over their shared Bleed American CD. “We fought over that thing so much it got so scratched and doesn’t play anymore,” she recalls.
That sibling connection found its way into the song ‘Float’, a shimmering track about trying to hold onto past versions of yourself for self-preservation in the face of overwhelming fear of the unknown. And in a full-circle moment, Jim Adkins of Jimmy Eat World appears on the song. “I got the emo titans to sing on this record,” she smiles. “Jimmy Eat World was a huge inspiration for a lot of the alternative rock songs, so it’s surreal to me that he’s on the record.”
Across Belong, these echoes of early-2000s alt-rock intertwine with her dream-pop production, citing Toro Y Moi, The 1975, and Frou Frou as further inspirations: “Her album Details, the one with ‘Let Go’ and ‘Breathe In’, was a huge inspiration for ‘Cards on the Table’ and the more electronic songs on the record.”
Making music with friends… and Hayley Williams
After years of producing for and performing with other artists, Jay Som has built a creative community rooted in trust and joy. On Belong, she collaborated closely with Joao Gonzalez, as well as many others from her circle of fellow musicians and producers. “I think naturally in production you’re exposed to so many genres and so many different types of techniques, and I’m looking at the ways others make music, or how they structure their songs, and how that could be incorporated into the stuff that I’m working on.”
One of the album’s highlights came from an unexpected collaboration with Hayley Williams, who co-wrote and sang on ‘Past Lives’. “It was overwhelming at times,” she admits. “I’m such a fan. I was nervous to even play her my demo.” But what began as a low-key session soon turned magical. “She had so many ideas and wanted to lay down vocals,” Jay Som recalls. “The outro, where she really sings her heart out, was all her idea.”
That experience, sharing creative space with someone she’d once idolised, reshaped her understanding of collaboration. “[Hayley] has been such a kind, supportive person for years now – like when I opened up for her or for Paramore in 2018 for the After Laughter Summer Tour, she just kept in touch throughout the years, just like asking what was up with the album and if I needed any vocals. For years, I was hopeful but still super shy, but I’m glad that eventually we made it happen.”
The freedom to not overthink
Jay Som has admitted that her perfectionist tendencies make it hard for her to let go of a project. “I feel like I don’t consider a record finished until mixing is really done,” she explains. “I know some people are like, ‘I finished the record: I tracked it, I wrote it out, the lyrics are all there’. But part of my production process is during the mixing stage, and I’m super controlling about it. I need to be at my computer for hours just making sure all the pieces fit together.”
That shift came partly from emotional necessity. “A big reason why I write music is because of the therapeutic elements of it all,” she reveals. “When you write a letter to someone or type something down, especially if you don’t do this all the time, you feel so much better afterwards, like you needed to put that energy out in a physical form.”
“That’s what this record feels like for me. I feel confused by it, but I also don’t want to overthink it,” she says. “I think there’s so much magic in not knowing why I do what I do.”
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