“Vomit Coffin” centers on Han-Tyumi’s interactions with his creation, the Soy Protein Munt Machine (narrated by the Mel text to speech voice). While Han-Tyumi proclaims that he is both the machine’s father and god, the Munt Machine responds in sadness, arguing that it doesn’t want to live a life of vomit and death. Han-Tyumi, feeling betrayed by his creation, plugs himself in to experience it himself. While the song has a memorably unique name, the song itself is nothing to scoff at. It’s a loud, chugging song with a hypnotic middle section that leads us to the climatic end of Murder of the Universe.
A demo for “Vomit Coffin” was released as part of Demos Vol. 5: Music To Think Existentially To. It’s an instrumental version with a different, longer break section and a shorter ending that doesn’t repeat. Stu revealed during an interview with Midnight Chats that the song’s title was a reference to another band. “The track title is my little brother Lucky and, um, a few of his friends including my cousin Tom Mackenzie and a bunch of other people… I actually can’t remember the exact lineup but it was just a lot of people that were around our family house when we were young, like, early teenage years, I’d say. They had a band that would rehearse in our — the garage, in the parent’s garage. And, um, it was like a parody metal band and I think they were quietly taking the piss out of me and my friends and the bands that we were playing in… but anyway their band was called Vomit Coffin and I’ll never forget that because it just, it was just so perfect, it was like ‘this is amazing, I’m going to use that in something one day’ and so, yeah, one day it made sense.” “Vomit Coffin” was released on Murder of the Universe on June 23rd, 2017 and appeared in a promotional video for it.
In Jason Galea’s music video for “Han-Tyumi and the Murder of the Universe” (released April 30th, 2017) the song is depicted through a live performance of the band, presumably shot at the Night Cat in Naarm (Melbourne) with text writing out Han-Tyumi’s dialogue for the break. In the band’s 2022 Reddit AMA Stu mentioned that this video was one of the most fun to shoot.
The first known performance of the song was on 2017-04-03 at Port City Music Hall in Portland where it appeared between “The Lord of Lightning” and “Am I In Heaven?” at the end of the set. It remained in this position until May 2018 where it joined “Digital Black” as part of a suite composed almost entirely of Murder of the Universe material. This was “Digital Black” > “Vomit Coffin” > “The Lord of Lightning” > “Cellophane.” Performances from this time were notably shorter, with an abbreviated version of the song’s middle before a quick rundown of the song’s first verse. This version was played frequently in 2018 before changing in 2019 into part of a shortened version of “Han-Tyumi and the Murder of the Universe.” In 2020 the song was played twice, once in the shortened medley, another time in a larger configuration which included “Han-Tyumi, the Confused Cyborg.” This would be the song’s exclusive spot going forward. 2022 versions include the entire song with a narration-less break that is started with a repeated “vomit” line before the first verse, much like at the end of the studio version.