Wait Until You Hear Him Scream

By Alina Halai for Young N’ Loud Magazine

The first thing people do when Jay Valeyo walks onstage is make an assumption.

It’s understandable. He looks a certain way. He comes out of a certain scene. And for the first few seconds, maybe, the assumption holds. Then he picks up the guitar. Then he screams. And the room does something you don’t see often – it genuinely surprises itself.

Jay has been watching that happen for a while now. He doesn’t think he will ever tire of it.

Valeo – Valeyo

Jay is the nickname. Valeyo is the part he built.

It comes from valeo – Latin for valor, courage, vitality, inspiration. He derived it himself and made it his own. Not as a character he performs, but as a standard he holds himself to. The name isn’t about image. It’s a reminder. The kind you put somewhere you’ll keep seeing it.

He grew up in a musical household in New Jersey – mom a singer, dad a producer. Music was ambient from the beginning, something in the air before it was a decision. He found rock early and stayed. Taught himself guitar, started a band, sang lead. The path had a shape to it even when he was young.

Hip-hop first, rock ‘n’ roll forever

New Jersey put him close to New York, and New York meant hip-hop. That’s where the early network was, where the early opportunities were. So for a stretch that’s what he made – pop-rap, melodic rap, music that fit the rooms he was in.

It wasn’t dishonest. But it was just part of the bigger picture.

Rock was always underneath it. The bands he grew up on, the guitar he taught himself, the sound that had always felt most like home. He knew he’d get there eventually. The question was how to make the transition without losing what he’d already built.

His earliest release was a pop-rap song called Favorite. Then came a stretch of melodic, emo rap and hyperpop. Then Breaking Out – the record that marked the turn. From that point, he stopped making music for the genre and started making it for himself. He describes it simply: committed to doing right by himself rather than fighting to become digestible. That’s a line worth sitting with.

What happens at the American Dream Mall

His first solo show was an acoustic set. Singer-songwriter, stripped back. It was fine. It wasn’t it.

The show that changed things was at the American Dream Mall in New Jersey. He had a close friend on guitar with him, and the minute that happened – the minute there was another person on stage, another instrument in the mix – something clicked back into place. The band feeling. The ensemble. He’d had it before and missed it without fully knowing he was missing it.

Now he brings his closest friends on the road with him. When they headline, he plays guitar for their sets. It’s reciprocal in the way that only works when people actually like each other.

And live, the catalogue transforms. Songs that started as hip-hop or pop-RnB become something closer to hard rock or post-hardcore by the time they hit the stage. The crowd doesn’t always see it coming. That’s part of the experience. People show up with one expectation and leave talking about something else entirely.

South By Southwest and standing taller

The tension was real at SXSW. Jay was performing at hip-hop events, still working within a network that didn’t quite match where his music was going. He wasn’t sure it would land. Whether the audience would follow him somewhere they hadn’t come to go.

It did. They did. More than the reception though, it was the feedback afterward that stuck. People told him that watching him stand out — watching him be different and own it without apology – had made them feel like they could stand up taller in their own lives. That’s not a compliment about a setlist. That’s the thing he was actually trying to do.

He’d already had a version of that moment in Rutherford, NJ – the first time a crowd sang his lyrics back to him word for word. He still gets chills thinking about it. The words leaving him and becoming someone else’s. That’s the goal, every time.

The fight songs and the ones that heal

Jay writes about mental health. Emotions, love, the human experience in all its unfinished, imperfect detail. Some songs sit in the harder places – anger, friction, the kind of feeling you need somewhere to put. He calls those fight songs.

But even the fight songs aren’t there to leave people heavy. The point is always to surface something so it can move. He wants his listeners to feel understood, the way his favourite bands made him feel understood growing up – like the world was less lonely because someone had already put words to the thing he couldn’t say.

He starts songs with a guitar riff and lets it build. Freestyles on the mic, follows the thread, lets the track suggest where it wants to go. A lot of it feels subconscious to him. The song knows before he does. His influences are wide – Pierce the Veil, Born of Osiris, Ed Sheeran, Kehlani. He grew up making films too, and that visual instinct still shows up. Song titles and stories arrive like scenes sometimes.

Before the show

A few minutes before he steps out, Jay goes still.

He sees himself on a large stage at the peak of his career. He sits in it long enough to feel it, then he carries that energy into the actual room – whether there are twenty people in it or two hundred. The crowd size doesn’t change how he performs. That’s a decision he made and keeps making.

Meditation keeps him grounded offstage. So do his friends. And concerts – going to them, watching acts he loves, studying what works and why. He says he almost only feels alive onstage. Finding peace in the spaces between is something he works at.

The album

Ten tracks. Finalised, almost ready. He describes it as the record that defines the lane he’s taking – the clearest version yet of who Jay Valeyo actually is. Loud, free, emotionally honest, and a blend of his influences packaged into his own rock and metal sound. The next chapter in the shape it was always going to take.

Collaborative projects are coming too, with friends, which means new sides of him that haven’t been heard yet. Dream collabs: Oli Sykes and Bring Me the Horizon. Justin Bieber. Ed Sheeran. He’s specific about it.

Success is making new fans and hearing that the music made them feel understood. Awards, sold-out venues are in the picture but the people landing first, that part is non-negotiable.

Jay Valeyo’s debut album is coming soon. Follow @jayvaleyo for updates.