Jay Som – Belong
What once was meticulous and solitary is now plural and porous, Jay Som’s Belong is a study in letting go
Six years on from her last record, Jay Som returns with Belong, an album built on the paradox of letting go. Where Melina Duterte’s earlier work was characterised by fastidious self-production, here she enacts a trust fall, opening her craft to collaborators and letting her palette spill outward.
This sense of community lends weight to Duterte’s nostalgia. Float, assisted by Jimmy Eat World's Jim Adkins, weaponises turn-of-the-millennium pop-punk to ask what preservation might be found in fear. The record’s sequencing underlines its restless thesis: the solemnity of Appointments melts into the weightless bounce of Drop A, a movement from stasis to momentum central to Duterte’s embrace of flux. Past Lives, buoyed by Hayley Williams’ harmonies, erupts into a scale Jay Som once shied from, before collapsing into the spectral murk of D.H.
The record constantly oscillates, its shifts of texture and tone underscoring this surrender of control: indecision to conviction, solitude to chorus. Nowhere is this clearer than on closer Want It All, arriving as atonal guitar scrape and blown-out drums, but as Duterte’s hook cuts through – 'You want to leave / You want it all' – the mix galvanises, marching from hesitation to determination. As it winds down, we're left on the ambient sounds of Duterte and her collaborators laughing in the studio: an unpolished humanisation that quietly codifies Belong, letting the work itself dissolve into the act of belonging.
Listen to: Float, Past Lives, Want It All