Defying Decay’s Jay Poom Euarchukiati walks us through the fourteen tracks that make up their daring and dramatic third album.
The Requiem: A Bipolar Nightmare
“We open this record the way an opera opens — with an overture, something that builds before a single lyric is heard. There’s a flute solo at the start with this distinctly Asian quality; that’s our culture in there, even if most people won’t catch it first listen. But listen for the viola solo at the end — viola is the instrument nobody takes seriously, it never gets a moment, and this one’s for every person who’s never been given a platform.”
Built to Fall
If you’ve played Dark Souls, you already understand this album — the final boss Gwyn lights himself on fire trying to hold on to something that’s already dying, and it only makes everything worse. That’s the world. Everything humans build is built to fall, every empire, every system, and the cycle just keeps repeating. When the arrangement strips back the way it does here, the voice has nowhere to hide — and that’s the point.
The Law 112: Secrecy and Renegades
I’m not going to explain this one — the ambiguity is the whole point, and the lyrics were written so anyone could be saying them from any side. What I will say is we didn’t spend a single penny on advertising, and the BBC still came calling. Sometimes you don’t need a budget. You just need to say something people already feel.
RX Regicide
This is the one. Royal Blood energy, Kellin Quinn from Sleeping With Sirens on vocals, and a bassline under the chorus that hasn’t left my head since we recorded it. We played it live once before it was even released and the crowd was already singing the hook back at us — they didn’t even know the name of the song yet. If you’re going to play one track from this record today, make it this one.
Pale
Think Bohemian Rhapsody as a reference point — I know how that sounds, and I’m not claiming I got anywhere near it, but that’s genuinely what I was reaching for. The structure breaks every rule: the second verse is built from a melody I originally wrote as a chorus, and there’s a bridge that changes time signature completely. It’s a piece of music I want people to experience as a whole — not just skip through.
21 Stitches
Nu-metal at heart with this electronic shuffle running through it — the video is a Fight Club homage, which tells you everything about the energy we were going for. Every time we play this live a circle pit opens without fail. ‘I’m just finding ways to get back to when I felt good and alive.’ Most people know exactly what that means.
Clouds
My attempt at a proper pop song — what made the Violette Wautier collaboration click was finding out she grew up on Fall Out Boy too, so despite coming from completely different worlds, we had the same musical language. My dad’s 1970 Cadillac Eldorado is in the video — he bought it in America, shipped it back to Thailand, I fixed it up myself, and fifty years later it ends up in a music video. I still can’t fully explain what that means to me.
Meaningless!
This started as a Blackpink parody — I always wondered what K-pop would sound like if it was genuinely heavy, so I leaned into all the flexing and showing off, which is exactly why it’s called Meaningless. But the chorus is where it turns: ‘Even if my words seem meaningless, it feels like I’m carrying the weight of this world tonight.’ Music that sounds like it means nothing can still carry everything.
Prelude: A Peaceful Sleep
This is the orchestral intro to Debris cut into its own track — partly so you can breathe before what’s coming, but mostly because I wanted fourteen tracks and not thirteen. I was born in the Year of the Rat; in Chinese culture, the number four sounds close to the word for death, but for me it’s lucky. If you want to skip straight to Debris, press fast forward.
Debris
This is the track for anyone who’s woken up and immediately felt like the world is too loud. It’s about watching from the outside — the noise, the media, the hysteria that never quite adds up to anything. ‘Am I afraid of the world? I’m not afraid of their words.’
Last Reply
My dad always told me my music was too heavy for him — so when I was writing this, I sat with him and played the chorus on acoustic guitar, quietly, and he said he thought it was good. He passed away before I could show him the finished version. It’s a song about the moment just before something falls apart for good — but that’s also what it means to me now.
Inside These Lies
The oldest song on the record — written in 2017, and when I finished the demo and posted it on social media, the news broke that Chester Bennington had died. It’s the most Linkin Park-influenced thing I’ve ever written and I’ll never be able to separate those two things. When someone asked where ‘you did it to your fucking self’ came from, I said: this song is about putting out this whole album.
System of Sinners
This album was going to be called System of Sinners for a long time — so this track is really the original heartbeat of the whole record. I wrote it with our drummer Mark, and there’s something about writing with him that just pulls the aggression out immediately; it’s one of the most physically intense things we play live. The lyric ‘take revenge then make amends’ is the whole tension of the song in six words — two completely opposing instincts sitting right next to each other, unresolved. That’s not a mistake. That’s just honest.
Hide & Seek
Seven versions over several years — the original was a Deftones track and the final version ended up somewhere closer to Bon Iver, but the lyrics and melody never changed once, which is how I learned they were always the only things that mattered. We filmed the video on the same hillside they used for Skyfall in Glencoe, Scotland — one camera, no lighting, nothing like anything we’d made before, because the song deserved something that felt as exposed as it sounds. It’s about a close friend who seems to have everything figured out from the outside but is still chasing something they can’t quite name.
