Jay Villarosa has a lot going on. He cuts hair. He brews lambanog. He skates. He makes music under the name Sexy Jay that sounds like Joy Division found a tricycle and decided to stay. And sometime last July, he woke up with a mouth ulcer, that specific, nagging, inescapable sting that no amount of Kenalog quite fixes, sat down with a beat he’d been working on, and thought: yes, this. This is the song.
Born from that moment is “Singaw,” out today, and exactly as absurd and as good as that origin story promises. A churning, groove-locked post-punk track built around one of the most mundane afflictions in human experience, it has been a fixture of Villarosa’s live sets for years, the kind of song that earns a reputation before it ever gets recorded, that crowds lean into even when they do not know the words yet.
“May singaw ako nung time na yon kaya yan pumasok na lyrics habang pinapakinggan ko yung beat na nagawa ko”
–Jay Villarosa (Sexy Jay)
In translation, it is disarmingly simple: he had a mouth ulcer, he had a beat, the two met. What emerged from that collision is the kind of song that makes you wonder why no one had written it before, because of course mouth ulcers are post-punk. They are small, they are constant, they exist just below the surface of your life, and no matter how many times you forget about them, one wrong bite of bread brings the whole thing roaring back.
The Brooding Business of Small Pain
Musically, “Singaw” sits in a lineage that Villarosa wears openly. The track’s instrumentation, hypnotic, cycling, coiled with tension, draws clear comparisons to the brooding propulsion of Joy Division’s early work, specifically the kind of locked-groove menace that made Unknown Pleasures feel less like an album and more like a transmission from somewhere darker and more honest than ordinary life.
But where Joy Division wrote about alienation and dread, Sexy Jay writes about a sore on the inside of your cheek. The joke, if there is one, is that the gap between those two things is smaller than it looks. Pain is pain. The body insists on being noticed. “Singaw” takes that insistence seriously, or at least as seriously as a man who brews his own lambanog and cuts hair on the weekends takes anything, and the result is both funny and oddly moving.
A Live Song That Finally Made It to Record
For anyone who has caught a Sexy Jay set before, “Singaw” is not a surprise. It is a relief. The track has been part of his live rotation long enough to have acquired the kind of crowd familiarity that recorded songs rarely achieve before release. People knew the arc of it, the moment when the groove locks in, the peculiar catharsis of shouting about a mouth ulcer in a room full of people who have also had mouth ulcers. Which is everyone.
Villarosa says “Singaw” is his second favorite track on an upcoming album set for June 2026, which, if true, raises interesting questions about what the first favorite might be. His debut single “Daga” already established him as someone uninterested in the obvious move. “Singaw” confirms it.
This is an artist who finds material everywhere and trusts himself enough to follow it wherever it leads, especially when it leads to a sore on the inside of his mouth.
A lyric video by Jyzel Monzon accompanies the release. It will, presumably, be every bit as strange and committed as the song deserves.