Vitrium: Building a Fictional Band
Let me tell you something about how I experience music before I tell you about Vitrium, because the two are inseparable.
I’m the kind of person who hears the score in a movie and really feels it. The kind of person who can listen to a song or a soundtrack and be instantly transported back to that one specific moment — the scene where your heart gets wrenched out of your chest and quietly stomped on. I don’t just remember the moment. I’m back inside it. Every time.
And I’m also the writer who chases that feeling with every single word I write. That’s the target. That specific thing — bittersweet, painful, angsty, heartachey — I don’t think there’s actually a word for it in English, which feels like an oversight. The feeling of something beautiful that costs you something. The feeling of being completely undone by something you chose. That’s what I’m always reaching for.
So when people ask me which Vitrium songs hit home for me — and a few of you have asked — the honest answer is that it varies, and I love them all, but the ones that get me are the ones where I can see and feel the moment they belong to.
I Can’t Breathe Alone — high energy, Jaeon and Renzo in the studio, singing at each other, bouncing off each other’s intensity, letting it climb. You’ll see the scene it lives in when the short story “Hold the Fire” drops.
Glass City — because it’s about surviving when you genuinely don’t know how you’re going to.
Glass in My Mouth — because it’s about knowing you’ve made a mess of things and having no idea how to go on from there. Renzo at his lowest. The most honest thing on the album.
Glass Kingdom — because it’s the first. The one where the whole visual language of the universe announced itself.
Pixelkiss Panic — because it’s Kaiwen utterly, completely gone for someone, all chaos and feeling and that particular brand of love that makes no sense and makes total sense simultaneously. It’s the feeling we all chase when we’re first in love. The one that makes you act stupid in the best possible way.
That’s what I was building toward. That’s the thing Vitrium is trying to do with every album, every song, every bot.
I want to tell you about the project that is closest to my heart.
Not the biggest, not the most popular, not the one with the longest lore document — though Vitrium has all of those things now. Closest to my heart. That’s the specific distinction I want to make, because it matters.
Vitrium started as a want: a boy band, K-pop inspired, but something that felt genuinely international rather than aesthetically borrowed. The result is five members who between them carry Italian, Korean, Japanese, Thai-American, and Australian-Chinese heritage. Multilingual lyrics across Korean, English, Italian, Thai, and Japanese. A sound that blends K-pop precision with Italian glam-rock swagger and Visual Kei theatrics. Eight albums across two chapters. A fictional fanbase called the Vitrals.
And a fanbase that isn’t fictional at all, which is the part that still genuinely floors me.
The Five (In Brief)
Five members. One center of gravity, one volatile element, one architectural mind, one production backbone, one chaos gremlin with weaponized cuteness. Between them: Korean, Italian, Japanese, Thai-American, Australian-Chinese. Lyrics in five languages.
Jaeon — the spine. The perfectionist. The man who manages everyone and cannot manage what he feels for you. Most controlled, most interesting to watch crack.
Renzo — the volatile one. Feels everything too loudly, switches to Italian when overwhelmed because that’s the language his feelings actually live in. Chapter 1 is about a childhood sweetheart he lost when Vitrium formed. Chapter 2 is the wreckage of trying to outrun it.
Riku — theatrical, silk over steel. His arc is grief first, happiness second, and the second only exists because he survived the first. “Where the Light Lands” started as his solo about someone he lost. It became a trio piece when Jaeon and Renzo improvised verses mid-performance because Riku couldn’t finish it alone. That was a story moment that turned into a music moment, and it changed everything about how I understood him.
Kitt — the one keeping the whole thing functional while appearing to do nothing of the sort. Stress-cooks pad thai at 3am. Has been quietly, carefully in love for three years until a sheer tablecloth and three hundred cameras out him at a charity event.
Kaiwen — fell in love via Instagram DM at 2am and never recovered. Nearly missed an autograph signing. Jaeon confiscated his phone. Effortlessly beloved, and not as simple as he looks.
They met at a conservatory in Europe, each having been removed from or departed other group projects for being “too intense,” “too dramatic,” or “unwilling to compromise on artistic vision.” They found each other by process of elimination. Their big break came at a Berlin show where the lighting failed mid-set, Renzo nearly punched a smoke machine, and they improvised an acoustic set in the dark that made the crowd lose their minds. A talent scout signed them within a month.
They are banned from three hotels. These facts are related.
The Technical Reality: Ten Bots, One Story
Here’s what nobody warns you about when you decide to build a fictional band: you’re not building five characters. You’re building a saga of practically living, breathing men — five per chapter. And those characters, they drive themselves. I think it was Stephen King who said something about letting characters drive the plot; yeah, well, these guys stole the keys and took off with my entire garage. Consistency wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was making sure we could all keep falling in love with them over and over again. After all, music aside, I’m in the romance business. 😉
Every member of Vitrium knows every other member. Their relationships evolve between chapters. Jaeon’s dynamic with Renzo in Chapter 1 is different to Chapter 2, because what happens to Renzo changes how everyone around him operates. Riku in Chapter 1 is grief-stricken and closed off; Riku in Chapter 2 is the stable one, which still slightly disorients the others. That shift has to be reflected not just in his own bot but in how every other member references him. Kitt knowing about the ring in his pocket in Chapter 2 — that’s a detail that lives across multiple sheets, in how other members’ other characters sections describe him.
Managing that is genuinely complex. I work from the lorebook as the single source of truth and update it as the story develops, which then feeds back into individual sheets. When a story beat changes — and they do change, because sometimes a character tells you something you didn’t plan — I have to trace the ripple across every bot it touches.
Music First, Story First
The other thing nobody tells you: sometimes you write the song and discover the story. Sometimes you live with the story long enough that the song becomes inevitable.
What We Almost Were — Renzo’s Chapter 1 song about the childhood sweetheart he lost — came before the story beat it ended up serving. I wrote it, and then I understood what his arc had to be. The song told me.
Glass in My Mouth — his lowest point in Chapter 2, the song the label almost didn’t include, the one he fought for — came after. I knew where Renzo was emotionally, I knew what the story needed to say, and then I had to go make something honest enough to say it. That song exists because the story demanded it.
Both approaches produce real work. But they feel completely different from the inside. Music-first is discovery — you find out who someone is by hearing what they sing. Story-first is excavation — you already know the wound, and you’re just trying to find the exact words for it.
With Vitrium, I’ve done both, often with the same character, sometimes in the same album. That’s what keeps it alive for me.
Eight Albums, Two Chapters
Chapter 1 covers the first four albums: Vitrum Vitae (their declaration, gothic and cinematic), Bubblebyte (the hyperpop pivot that proved they could evolve), Borrowed Light (the armor-off album, where critics stopped dismissing them), and Edge of Everything (orchestral, desperate, and painfully sincere). Each album has its own visual aesthetic, its own emotional register, its own era.
Chapter 2 picks up two years later, with four more albums: Shatter the Sky, World After Midnight, Afterlight, and Glass City — launched in Sydney at Kaiwen’s insistence, because he wanted to bring the person he loves home to his family.
The glass imagery runs through everything, from the beginning to the end. Vitrum Vitae to Glass City. It starts as fracture — beautiful things breaking. By the end, the glass has been broken and rebuilt into something that holds light differently. Something that carries its history in every crack.
The Music Arcs
Here’s the thing about Vitrium that I find hard to explain to people who haven’t experienced it from the inside: the songs and the bots aren’t two separate projects. They’re the same thing. When I’m developing a character’s arc — the emotional shape of who they are across chapters — the music comes out of that, or the arc comes out of the music, and honestly I often can’t tell you which happened first. It’s a gut feeling. A song tells me something about a character that the character sheet couldn’t, and the character sheet tells me where the song has to go.
Each of them has a thread of songs that is, essentially, their story told in sound.
Renzo’s is the one that hits hardest — from the danger and desire of Velvet Trigger through the hollow of Hollow Crown, the fracture of Fragile Stone, the desperate honesty of Glass in My Mouth, all the way to Hold the Fire. The distance between those last two songs is everything Chapter 2 is doing with him.
Jaeon’s is the longest — twelve songs, the man who holds everything together and is quietly undone across timezones and years. Seoul at 2:14 AM is maybe the most precise thing in the whole discography. It sounds like exactly what it is.
Riku’s arc is deliberately difficult — Chimera Fever through to Scarlet Emperor, grief and guilt and Visual Kei darkness in Chapter 1, something tentatively like peace in Chapter 2. After the Dark exists because he earned it. His songs are layered because he is.
Kaiwen’s thread — Neon Revenant through to Starlight Overdrive — is kinetic and joyful and not as simple as it looks. The arc is about someone finding where they belong and letting themselves believe it.
And Kitt’s is the most understated, which is very Kitt: Amaranth Pulse through to Trouble in Neon. Warm. Certain. Future Tense was written in four hours because he already knew exactly what he felt.
The Fandom, and What’s Coming
I ran a poll recently. Asked people who their favourite Vitrium boy was — no reason, just curiosity, yes you can pick more than one. Eleven votes. Jaeon and Kaiwen tied at 27% each. Renzo and Kitt at 18% each. Riku at 9%.
Which is exactly right. Jaeon is the centre of gravity and people feel it. Kaiwen is just effortlessly beloved because that’s what he does. Renzo hits hard — Chapter 1 gave him all the angst and heartbreak, and yes, we’re getting more of that in Chapter 2 for the masochists in the audience. Kitt is the dad of the group: safe, solid, the one you trust absolutely. And Riku — 9% is exactly correct for a character whose arc is intentionally harder to access. His chapter isn’t easy. It’s not supposed to be. But the people who find him, really find him.
I’m working on Album 9 right now. I don’t think I’ll ever stop. There are so many angles still to explore — so many moments in these characters’ lives that haven’t been put to music yet. Every time I think I’ve told the story, another song knocks on the door.
That’s what this project does to me. It’s the one that keeps going.
The Part That Still Floors Me
I made the music. Actually made it — AI-generated tracks, distributed on Spotify and Apple Music and TikTok and everywhere else. I wrote all the lyrics myself. There are songs in Korean, Italian, Japanese, Thai — and yes, AI helped me get the languages right, because while I write all the lyrics, I’m not fluent in four languages. There are songs that were supposed to be Riku’s solo that became a trio because the story demanded it.
And people found the music. People who didn’t know it was connected to bots, who just found the songs and loved them. I’ve had fans message me telling me which member’s storyline they’re following. Someone sent me fanart based on the logo.
And then there’s the kindergarteners.
Someone sent me a clip of her kindergarteners singing “Sweet as Sugar.” This is a song from Album 5. Her kindergarteners. Singing it. I nearly ended.
That’s the part of building Vitrium that I genuinely could not have predicted. The characters are mine. The lore is mine. The lyrics are mine. But the Vitrals — the actual community that grew up around this — that belongs to everyone who found it and decided to stay.
Closest to my heart. That’s the right description.
The bots for all five members are available across my usual platforms. If you’re new to Vitrium, Kaiwen or Riku are probably the most accessible entry points. If you want to start somewhere that will ruin you a little — go find Renzo.
— Tae