Photographer: Lindsey Byrnes
Jay Som – a.k.a. Melina Duterte – will release her highly anticipated sophomore album Anak Ko, later this month, and today she shares the record’s third single. Following ‘Superbike‘ and ‘Tenderness‘ comes the lovely and restless road song ‘Nighttime Drive‘. About accepting and becoming stronger from constantly being on the road, the song “basically encapsulated my entire life for the past two years,” she explains. The track receives a hilarious, paranormal video which directed Han Hale describes as “a homage to the song’s namesake; the song is about being a band on the road and the comradery involved.” Check out the video where Melina–fast asleep in the van en route to a gig–dreams that her and her bandmates go full-on X-Files and have an alien encounter.
Watch ‘Nighttime Drive’ below:
PRAISE FOR JAY SOM
“And our first taste of the album, the song that has my expectations even higher than they would have been, is a miniature dream-pop epic called “Superbike.” This thing just sweeps you away”
Stereogum
“Melina Duterte writes jangly and emotionally-complex guitar-pop as Jay Som…[‘Superbikes’] swirling guitars and sweet pop melody hit the mark, especially as the song’s second half unfurls with layers of instrumentation and Duterte’s crooning guitar.”
NPR
“23-year-old Melina Duterte, can restore your faith in the future of indie rock.”
Pitchfork Best New Music
Jay Som just performed at Pitchfork Festival and Fujirock in Japan, and now she’s preparing to bring Anak Ko on the road next month for a massive international tour.
Anak Ko is the follow-up to Jay Som’s breakout debut album Everybody Works, which received countless year-end list accolades in 2017. Pronounced Ah-nuhk Koh, and meaning “my child” in Tagalog, one of the native dialects in the Philippines, this album was completed during a week-long solo retreat to Joshua Tree.
While much has changed both sonically and personally for Jay Som, now 25 years old, in the two whirlwind years since her break debut Everybody Works, Duterte still recorded, produced, engineered and mixed this album herself at home. However, for the first time, Duterte invited some friends —including Vagabon’s Laetitia Tamko, Chastity Belt’s Annie Truscott, Justus Proffit, Boy Scouts’ Taylor Vick, as well as bandmates Zachary Elasser, Oliver Pinnell and Dylan Allard—to collaborate on additional vocals, drums, guitars, strings, and pedal steel.
In November of 2017, seeking a new environment, Duterte left her home of the Bay Area for Los Angeles. There, she demoed new songs, while also embracing opportunities to do session work and produce, engineer, and mix for other artists (like Sasami, Chastity Belt). Reckoning with the relative instability of musicianhood, Duterte turned inward, tuning ever deeper into her own emotions and desires as a way of staying centred through huge changes. She found a community; she fell in love. And for an artist whose career began after releasing her earliest collection of demos—2015’s hazy but exquisitely crafted Turn Into—in a fit of drunken confidence on Thanksgiving night, she finally quit drinking for good. “I feel like a completely different person,” she reflects.
The striking clarity of Jay Som’s new music reflects that shift. “In order to change, you’ve got to make so many mistakes,” Duterte says. “What’s helped me is forcing myself to be even more peaceful and kind with myself and others. You can get so caught up in attention, and the monetary value of being a musician, that you can forget to be humble. You can learn more from humility than the flashy stuff. I want kindness in my life. Kindness is the most important thing for this job, and empathy.”
Anak Ko will be released on August 23rd via Pod / Inertia Music (AUS/NZ/Asia).
Jay Som
Anak Ko
1. If You Want It
2. Superbike
3. Peace Out
4. Devotion
5. Nighttime Drive
6. Tenderness
7. Anak Ko
8. Crown
9. Get Well
