Melina Duterte has probably one of the funniest stories related to a breakout album. It seems she had a bunch of semi-finished tracks already recorded and at a Thanksgiving dinner, Duterte had quite a few glasses of wine. As she told in this excellent Spin interview, she was reading messages from fans that were incentivizing her to release some of her work. Duterte then randomly chose nine of them, didn’t even think about the track order and uploaded into the web what would be her album Turn Into.

As you probably have already figured it out, Jay Som is the artistic moniker used by Duterte to perform her music. Originally from San Francisco, Melina is only 22 years old but has been putting out music since around 2012 on music platforms like Soundcloud and Bandcamp. Her songs could fall under the “dream pop” umbrella, even though I think her sound is not obvious enough to be solely linked to one specific subspace of music. What is fairly obvious is that she can create great and fresh pop songs.

After she uploaded those nine tracks into Bandcamp, everything came into place for Jay Som and loads of opportunities and recognition were on the way. Turn Into wasn’t simply being relaunched by a record label: the album was re-released twice, first for Topshelf Records and later for Polyvinyl Records. She’s now preparing her proper debut album for Polyvinyl and it should be out sometime this year (edit: shortly after writing this post, she actually announced that her new album, Everybody Works, will be out this March 10) .

Most of the songs in Turn Into have that bedroom-pop/lo-fi feeling, characteristic of Frankie Cosmos, Alex G or early Car Seat Headrest. And while she uses many of dream pop’s characteristics, Duterte can add sufficient twists to the sound throughout the record that makes the album not feel stale at any moment. She starts the album with Peach Boy and we are immediately presented with this fuzzy and catchy guitar riff followed by her dreamy vocals singing about the implications derived from caring about someone who’s in a different emotional landscape than hers:

And when the time has come will you run off to make your mark?

Your secret lullaby will pull my strings to hurt my pride

I’m wandering off again

You’re bored again, so cold again

I’m counting the fingers off my hands

The next track, Ghost, kicks off with a beautiful acoustic strumming and mostly deals with the confrontation of fears:

Are you afraid?

I’m not ashamed to feel this way

You always say “a father would never leave his kids he’d stay”

But I’m afraid

But, as Melina explains it in an interview with KQED, the subject of fearfulness is really all over the record:

Being scared is a huge theme of the album. But towards the end — actually, I don’t know. I was going to say there’s a sense of acceptance, but I don’t think there is.

Personally, I think the highlight of the album is its title track, Turn Into, which is also the record’s closer. Even if it wasn’t intentional of her to have this track finishing the album, Turn Into perfectly captures the album’s general atmosphere: a gauzy, dreamy cloud of sound with her hush-y vocals alongside all the reverb. Also, I love the album’s closing lines as they seem to give some kind of closure:

Now that you’re by my side

Don’t leave, don’t hurt my pride

You’ve turned into the sign I’ve wished for

The light kisses my eyelids

As I take a short breath

I’m coming home

Already after the release of Turn Into, Jay Som put out a 7” with two semi-new songs (they were actually written around the same time as Turn Into‘s songs but didn’t make the cut). One of the tracks is I Think You’re Alright that, at first sight, sounds like a straight-forward love song. Melina initially describes some activities she would do for that special person in which makes her sound like a dedicated lover but, as the song progresses, we eventually realize that she’s not really satisfied with that relationship as her descriptions become progressively more cynical and less-flattering in the second half of the track:

I’ll be your old broken TV

Your stuttering baby

Your puppy when nobody’s home

I’ll be your cigarette ash tray

Come back when it’s too late

Worship you till morning comes

We really should have been prepared for that plot-twist since the title of the song is pretty suggestive towards a conformist behavior. In a way of “you’re alright enough, so it’s better than being all alone”. But the track’s change of tone isn’t only felt in the lyrical sense. Even though the majority of the song has a slow pace and a sweet, tender instrumentation, in the final minute Duterte leaves all kindness behind, breaks the song apart and finishes it with a My Bloody Valentine-alike guitar solo. And this isn’t the only occasion where Jay Som goes full shoegaze. For example, on Turn Into‘s track Drown, after the first verse, she cleverly conjugates a heavy, drone-y guitar with a beautiful melodic sound until the noise eventually drowns the more delicate parts.

The accidental release of Turn Into wasn’t the only event that helped shaping Jay Som’s rise as an up-and-coming DIY act. Last year, Duterte had the opportunity of touring with fellow indie-rockers Japanese Breakfast and Mitski that allowed herself to showcase her great music to a vast group of people. In that Spin interview I referenced earlier, she talked about how was like being in an all-Asian-American women tour:

I think it’s incredible that for this bill, all three are Asian-American women. I think it’s the first time in history. The impact that has on us and the audience in general is so important. I was talking to Michelle from Japanese Breakfast about this the other day. The fact that there are little girls of color at the shows. I didn’t have that when I was younger. If I saw this bill, I would have thought that was insane. It’s so important that there’s this representation out there, right now, at this time.

Even if Jay Som is supposed to be Duterte’s DIY music project, there are times in these songs that it doesn’t even sound like it. She plays every instrument in every track and that includes guitar, bass, drums and keyboards (and she wants to incorporate some trumpet sounds on the new album), but the amount and quality of sound layers on Turn Into‘s songs (and both singles released on the I Think You’re Alright/Rush 7”) is unbelievably good for what is supposed to be a kind of homemade project. This set of songs have the best qualities of a bedroom recording without necessarily sound like it.

What’s also really amazing with this particular group of tracks is that this is how Jay Som was supposed to sound two or three years ago, both sonically and lyrically. I was perplexed when I realized that Duterte constantly downplayed Turn Into as a bunch of songs that she made a long time ago and it weren’t supposed to be widely consumed by the general public. This leaves high expectations for the new record because if this “collection of finished and unfinished songs” is already great, a new proper album within the context of a record label and representative of how Duterte’s current sound is, leaves Jay Som as one of the most promising acts out there.

Listen to Turn Into:

Listen to the I Think You’re Alright/Rush 7”: