Track By Tracks: DRLCT - Médée (2024)

1. Asunder:

It is the first track of ‘Médée’, an album dedicated to my mom who died of cancer on September 5, 2022. I wrote this album in memory of her fight and the last months of her life.

‘Asunder’ represents my mom’s state of mind at the moment she learned her disease won the war. Her hopes, her memories, the betrayals she suffered her whole life, the loneliness through her disease, her shattered body ... everything collides and thorns asunder. At that time, only the anger, the disbelief, and the despair remained. ‘Asunder’ tries to encapsulate this rush of residual emotions. Unlike the rest of the album, I had already written and shown the first instrumental version of this track to my mom back in 2021. She said to me: “It is sweet, powerful, and violent”. I promised her then to make a definitive version of it someday.

2. Un jour en octobre:

This is the brightest song on the album, but it represents a heartbreaking part of my mom’s journey. As the cancer spread to her brain, her cognitive abilities started slipping away. She couldn’t write properly, lace her shoes, or use her phone anymore. Words would escape her, and she struggled to explain what she was thinking. She wasn’t losing her mind, but it felt like everything was slipping away.

During that time, we talked a lot about old memories, which was comforting. But all too often, she'd suddenly lose track of her thoughts, and it was so overwhelming for her. She even experienced mild hallucinations from her meds and the cancer itself, which was terrifying.

The song reflects this: a nostalgic, upbeat first half, abruptly interrupted by a desperate, chaotic second part.

3. Flow your tears, that Bluebird said:

This is my favorite song of the album, even though it’s the simplest of the four. It represents August 14 2022, one of the most distressing days of my life. My mom had finally managed to reunite her close family and now felt ready to leave.

All day long, the five of us waited in anxious silence. Meanwhile, she waits in bed for Death to take her. Our mom first asks us to leave her room because “she can’t let go”. A few hours later, she asked us to take turns saying goodbye to her and to leave the house. I manage to wish her Godspeed, holding back my sobs. She waited all night but to no avail. Death refused her embrace.

The next day, my mom was angry. She blames herself for “not even being able to die”. She said to me a sentence that still makes my blood run cold: “This rotten body that doesn’t want me anymore needs to burn.”

4. Interlinked:

This one still hits me really hard to this day. It addresses the last days of my mom’s life and her painful death. She was desperately hoping to die, morphine wasn’t working anymore. We – the close family – were caught in tormenting emotions: we wanted the pain to end but it meant that we’d lose her forever.

I didn’t know how to handle the writing for this song; I went to a friend’s theater play where the soundtrack was just a single electric guitar with a clean sound playing a very melancholic and simple melody. I liked this idea a lot, and I started working on a haunting melody... I arranged a slow 5-minute build-up containing barely any drums.

The second part of the song is very intense with heavily distorted guitar, post-rock tremolo picking, and a growl/clean vocals duet. This part abruptly cuts with a lonely acoustic guitar fading into crashing waves: my mom dies, the last sparks of her life fading into non-existence.