‘Belong’ may be the first album since 2019 from Jay Som, the alias of LA songwriter Melina Duterte, but it’s far from a musical comeback. Duterte has spent those six years as an in-demand musician, engineer and producer, winning a Grammy for her work on The Record by boygenius, the band she subsequently joined as a touring member.
She draws on all those experiences to create an expansive album that retains a sense of intimacy while embracing indie rock anthems, hazy ballads, shimmering electronics and ambient experiments.
The collaborative spirit of the past half-decade carries through to ‘Belong’, which features guest vocalists for the first time on a Jay Som album.
For a teen who grew up listening to alt-rock radio outside of San Francisco, a fan of early 2000s pop-punk and emo, it’s fitting that childhood hero Jimmy Eat World’s Jim Adkins lends backing vocals on driving anthemic rocker Float.
Hayley Williams – a friend since Duterte supported Paramore on tour in 2018 – lends vocal harmonies to the soaring Past Lives, while Lexi Vega, of Mini Trees, contributes to Cards On The Table, the album’s opener. A slice of woozy synth-pop, it touches on the shifting nature of platonic friendships.
Other songs like Appointments are deeply intimate, allowing Duterte to be vulnerable and reflect on love and relationships, and while she has jokingly referred to Drop A as her “boyband song” in interviews, tonally it channels her recent boygenius bandmate Phoebe Bridgers.
The album closes though with a trio of experimental songs. Meander/Sprouting Wings features distorted vocals over an out-of-tune piano before a blast on a horn welcomes in a tender guitar and piano-led ballad. Her voice is raised to a higher pitch on A Million Reasons Why set against a dreamy ambient backdrop before Want It All closes the record with a crescendo of hazy, distorted grungy guitars. Assured, ambitious and satisfying, ‘Belong’ was worth the wait.
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