It took Maanmetta Puntoomsinchai a year and a half to finish one song. Not because the Bangkok-born, London-based artist behind 2045 was stuck — more because the song kept absorbing whatever was happening around it, mutating through post-punk demos and midwest emo sketches and noise experiments until the grief that eventually defined it had found its way into every layer.
“2ndtime2ndweek” started as something completely different. “It was a post-punk demo with a mix of psychedelic rock-inspired guitar effects, focusing on complex rhythms,” Puntoomsinchai explains. “At this point I wasn’t really thinking about grief or any of the song’s main themes yet. It was purely a musical demo.” It sat like that for months — one instrumental verse, a chorus shape, nothing more. He picked it back up after cycling through a batch of acoustic midwest emo demos and writing lyrics for those, some of which ended up folded into the final version. That detour also nudged the acoustic section that now sits right before the last chorus into place.
The harmony shifted too. The original was more complex, but most of that got stripped out in favor of the current progression. You can still hear traces of the earlier arrangement in the lead guitar during the instrumental sections. The shoegaze-dreampop chorus arrived after the chord change, once lyrics were in the picture. “I thought it needed a driving but catchy chorus,” he says. “Most of these ideas were not really conscious decisions in the moment, but were things I’ve always tried to keep in mind.”
Then there’s the noise. The heavier textural passages come from a less obvious corner of Puntoomsinchai’s practice. Before any of this, he was deep in electroacoustic and IDM territory — originally making fairly standard EDM, then gravitating toward people working in textural sound design. “We were specifically in an early form of what many people might now call ‘botanica,'” he says, “but I eventually got tired of what that scene has become, and found myself verging further and further towards noise music and also the sound design used in deconstructed club.” Those techniques feed directly into “2ndtime2ndweek.” He’d run the results through a guitar amp simulator to pull them back into the song’s world. Not to hide their origin, but for coherence. “Having at least the illusion that it might potentially come from a guitar makes me feel like it comes from the same world.”
He used those samples everywhere — some as a main element, like the lead guitar glitching out at the end, some buried as ambience. Earlier versions leaned much harder into it. He pulled back near the end of mixing, not because the noise wasn’t working, but because it was competing with what the song had become. “I wanted my voice and lyrics to be heard a bit clearer than my other songs, since I felt like it’s a story I truly wanted to tell,” he says. “Masking it behind noise, although it works in an artistic poetic way, didn’t really fit with how I wanted the song.”
The story is about loss, plainly. Puntoomsinchai lost two people close to him within two weeks of each other. The song tries to capture the specific feeling of hearing that kind of news a second time — the unease of already knowing what happened before it’s been confirmed. “Anyone could notice / It’s just like the first time it happened,” the opening lines go, and the lyrics stay in that uncomfortable space throughout, cycling through phone calls, the impulse to rush somewhere, the weight of repetition.
What came together over those eighteen months ended up mirroring the shape of grief more closely than he initially planned. “I realised a lot later that the sounds and genres I used really felt like a reflection on the process of grief itself, having parts of confusion, anger, denial, and more cathartic releases and general melancholy,” he says. “It felt really natural to the point where I didn’t really need to think about it.” The song shifts between post-punk drive, shoegaze density, rough noise passages, and a quieter acoustic stretch — not as a genre exercise, but because that’s how the thing grew.
Puntoomsinchai’s wider catalog follows a similar trajectory of gradual evolution. He started releasing music in 2017, originally in straight-up EDM, then slowly folding in guitar-based songwriting. His 2021 self-released debut “trust me, i wont leave” traces that arc across sixteen tracks, moving from dance music into dreampop and surf pop. “Unseen Skies,” a single on Bitbird in 2022 blending dreampop, shoegaze, and botanica within a dance framework, picked up over 400,000 plays and appeared in Valorant Champions Tour 2023 broadcasts. A second album followed in late 2023, fully in shoegaze territory after two years of reflective writing.
2045, he says, is his outlet for serious subjects and self-reflection, and it stays solo by design. “This slow process is just a side effect of me actively having to process my own thoughts and feelings through the music, so it will likely be similar for the future.” The song is part of a larger collection written on the same themes. If things come together, there may be an album eventually.
“2ndtime2ndweek” is out now everywhere. A visualizer accompanies the release on YouTube.
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