Jay Som

An indie singer/songwriter recognized for pensive material and a lush, textured approach to home-recorded production, Jay Som serves as the performing alias of multi-instrumentalist Melina Duterte. Early demos and previously circulated tracks were gathered for her initial label offering, the 2016 release Turn Into. While remaining rooted in home recording, Jay Som continued to hone and broaden that distinctive aesthetic across subsequent projects such as the 2019 album Anak Ko. Duterte joined forces in 2021 with Ellen Kempner of Palehound to create the duo Bachelor.

Born and raised in California’s Bay Area as the daughter of Filipino immigrants, Duterte started composing and posting music on social platforms during middle school, adopting a succession of names before adopting Jay Som. That moniker originated from the Wu-Tang Names Generator, the same site that produced Childish Gambino for Donald Glover. Under the Jay Som banner she shared a run of tracks throughout the early 2010s, then compiled a selection of those songs and demos into Turn Into, issued on cassette in early 2016 by Wave Dweller and Topshelf Records. She soon joined the Polyvinyl roster, prompting a July 2016 reissue of the collection as work began on a proper debut. In the interim she toured the United States and Canada alongside Mitski and Peter Bjorn and John.

Everybody Works, Jay Som’s first project planned from the outset as a full album, appeared in 2017. Although the self-produced effort achieved greater sonic clarity, it preserved an intimate bedroom-pop character and registered one week on Billboard’s Independent Albums chart. Later that year Duterte relocated to Los Angeles, where she connected with lo-fi singer/songwriter Justus Proffit; the pair co-wrote material that yielded the 2018 Polyvinyl EP Nothing’s Changed. Jay Som’s second album, Anak Ko—meaning “my child” in Filipino—followed on the same label in 2019. Composed during a solitary retreat in Joshua Tree and handled entirely by Duterte in the roles of producer, engineer, and mixer, the record marked her first solo outing to incorporate additional musicians, among them Proffit, Vagabon’s Laetitia Tamko, and Chastity Belt’s Annie Truscott. Her subsequent endeavor paired her once more with Ellen Kempner, known professionally as Palehound; under the Bachelor name the duo issued Doomin’ Sun in May 2021.