Where, you are almost certainly asking, has Jay Som been?Six years ago, in 2019, Melina Duterte released Anak Ko, the expansive third album from the project that had quickly grown far beyond its so-called bedroom pop origins into something resembling an actual band. Duterte still wrote and produced that Jay Som record, but her friends now surrounded her, playing parts of their own. But when a shuttered touring industry scrapped Jay Som’s ambitious 2020 plans, Duterte realized she had long needed a reset from the road after several years of constant pivots between touring and writing, anyway. She decided to splurge on herself and her lifelong interest in recording, funneling her government stimulus check into a piece of dream gear she’d repeatedly seen advertised—a vintage Neve console. She committed herself to manuals and online tutorials, peppering experienced friends with questions about becoming more than her own home-recording engineer. Five years later, she’s got a rich résumé of album credits, guest spots alongside the likes of Troye Sivan and beabadoobee, the centerpiece of the I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack, and a Grammy for her work on The Record by boygenius, the band she subsequently joined as a touring member. Yes, Jay Som itself has been on a bit of a break; Duterte, however, has perhaps been busier than ever.When Duterte reckoned the time had come to revisit Jay Som, she did not pretend to be hidebound by the project’s past. Instead, she let the half-decade of life she’d lived and work she’d done since releasing Anak Ko filter not only into her songs but also her process. The new friends she’d actually had time to make in Los Angeles now that she was off the road—especially Joao Gonzalez (of Soft Glas) and Mal Hauser (a collaborator to Mk.gee and Illuminati Hotties)—became key partners, as Duterte opened her music to others like never before. But she also opened up her music to herself and her memories, writing songs that revisited the sounds of her youth with the benefit of her experiences as a musician, producer, and performer. She was neither shy about her influences nor limited about where they might lead her. And so no previous Jay Som album sounds quite like the new Belong, a gripping 11-song set about self-definition and, well, belonging, that floats between supercharged power-pop hits and hazy ballads, between electronic curiosities and lighters-up anthems. It is a map of the first 31 years of Duterte’s life, all leading to the present that is Belong.“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 explains. “This record is essentially still me, but a lot of choices were made by friends who helped me, because I trusted them.”Duterte grew up with rock radio outside of San Francisco, memorizing the hits of early ’00s pop-punk and emo as a teen. Though she was 400 miles north along the California coast, The O.C. soundtracks—Imogen Heap, Bloc Party, Death Cab for Cutie, and so on—became major touchstones, too. You immediately hear the collision of it all in “Float,” the first song Duterte wrote for Belong. She was experimenting with the vocal synths that still frame the intro when amelody spilled out, inspiring the riff that soon slashes between those sampled synths and the buoyant beat. A top-down radio wonder, its massive chorus—“Float, don’t fight/I’m not the same”—documents the toggle between pressing into the unknown and trying the unexpected or staying still and doing what you have always done in a push to stay safe and sane. Fittingly, that is Jimmy Eat World’s Jim Adkins, one of those childhood heroes, offering background vocals; that’s a first for a Jay Som album, as Duterte pulls past and future toward an explosive present. Duterte grins unabashedly at her adolescent impulses, too, during “Casino Stars,” a lusty bit of acoustic emo about betting everything on love and trusting that this time you leave a winner.“I turned 30 while I was making this record. There is a portion of your 20s about being cool and hip and who can come up with the craziest ideas,” says Duterte, who also began her longest relationship ever while recording Belong. (The new couple even adopted a dog.) “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.”Those aren’t, of course, the only references she brandishes. Where “D.H.” bops like a prime piece of garage-rock smeared with the stain of, say, Sonic Youth, “Appointments” is a beautiful waltz between the sad-eyed wonder of Elliott Smith and the twilit glow of Phoebe Bridgers. Despite those kinships, it is a deeply personal reflection on rejection, acceptance, and imposter syndrome, or the realization that, even as we allegedly become good at something, we’re still capable of flaws and fears. “Missed your appointment/Your head on my lap,” she sings softly over chiming guitars as the second verse begins. “Changed your phone background/Smiling again.” It’s about finding a way to make it through these hangups, about enduring. In a way, all of Belong’s songs carry that implicit message—if you can’t embrace the sounds of your heroes to sort through your own mess, what are you doing, anyway?Belong, though, isn’t just Duterte’s record. Many of these songs emerged from relationships rooted in friendship first, collaboration second. Duterte and Gonzalez, for instance, became true pals only after she stopped touring so hard. When he brought her a sample early in the writing process, telling her it reminded him of Jay Som, she immediately agreed, the stuttering rhythm inspiring the melody that became “What You Need.” They built the song together, eventually moving beyond a beat borrowed from “Young Folks” to something that is as springy yet sad as the lyrics, a tight-rope walk between adoration and annoyance. Addictive on first listen, it’s a subtle wonder of production, too, its layers of drums and curdled synths serving as a platform for the bright guitars that bend through it.Though Duterte has never been one for special guests on Jay Som’s intimate records, Hayley Williams had insisted on singing together at some point since the band opened for Paramore in 2018. So Duterte and Steph Marziano—another new friend who has written with Bartees Strange and Cassandra Jenkins and who began working and hanging with Duterte after Williams introduced them—went to Nashville to try a song together. Williams’ soft harmonies on the arcing “Past Lives” reinforce its forlorn sense of drifting in and out of doldrums, of finding momentum only to watch it fade. It is a powerhouse of a tune, its downshifted midsection landing like a fistfight with oneself.And while Duterte’s production credits have mounted spectacularly since 2020, she knows enough to know she might not always know best. As she neared the end of Belong, she went to Philadelphia’s Headroom Studios, where producer Kyle Pulley told her that, simply as a Jay Som fan, he wanted to hear more of her. This became her first time working with another producer on Jay Som, yet another sign of her opening the band to others’ ideas. You can detect that insight and burgeoning conviction from the very first notes she sings on opener “Cards On The Table,” a brilliant piece of electronic pop where her warped voice cascades over tessellated drum machines and synths. (By the way, that’s Lexi Vega, of Mini Trees, offering harmonies; again, she, Williams, and Adkins are Jay Som’s first-ever guest vocalists, representing Duterte’s push to try new things with people she trusts.) The track is a pronouncement of renewed intentions for Jay Som, running from those first notes through the underwater experimentation of “Meander” and to the wall of noise and field recordings that end the finale, “Want It All.”Though “Want It All” is the capstone for Belong, it is also the thesis, the moment where Duterte makes the push and pull she feels in her life and career right now abundantly clear. For the better part of six years, she mostly checked out of Jay Som, cultivating and tending to the other side of her artistry. Now that she has returned to the band itself, she wonders where she belongs within an indie rock ecosystem, or how much of the rest of her life and work she is willing to give up to live up to that role. This is why she named these songs Belong, after all, as she tries to figure out where she fits into the wider world as an artist, producer, and person. “Do you really want to go? Will you hate what you will find?” she sings near the start of that title track, built on a seesaw of repetition. Duterte doesn’t know the answer yet, how she balances being an acclaimed and in-demand producer with being a proper bandleader, too. She just knows that Jay Som is back, invigorated by more ideas, experiences, and inputs than it’s ever enjoyed before.