Track By Tracks: Darkswoon - Antivenom (2026)

1. Connective Tissue:

I thought it would be cool to begin and end the album with a bit of what we call connective tissue. In live performance, Norah will often switch on the FX for a wall of sound, utilizing her enviable pedal board to a fuller extent to connect the songs and fill gaps while Rachel is setting up the next track on the drum machines and synths.

The opening track is a little instrumental glimpse of the connective tissue/noise experimentation that you’ll hear at our live performances, and if you listen all the way through, ‘Going Dark’ ends with this as well, bookending the album with dark atmosphere.

2. Antivenom:

The song Antivenom was inspired by the death of Nex Benedict, who was a non-binary teen in Oklahoma. They took their own life after being bullied and beaten up by classmates on Feb 8, 2024. As a trans nonbinary person, this tragedy really struck me and inspired this song. Lyrically, the words came from processing grief, thinking not only about Nex but all the trans lives lost or deeply affected by hateful policy and rhetoric that prevails, especially emboldened in the US and abroad. The song became a protection spell of sorts, honoring trans folks, especially trans youth, envisioning a shield around them and meditating on what their lives could have been. ‘Where do your dreams go when you die? They’re still happening on some other timeline’. I wish I could retroactively protect and preserve their beautiful lives, suck the poison out, and save them. The broader concept here is that music can be an antidote to the poisons of the world. This idea stayed with me throughout the creation of this album, resulting in Antivenom feeling like the best title for the body of work.

3. Pacific City:

I wrote the music for this song on the Oregon coast in Pacific City, hence the name. I was out there by myself for a solo music writing retreat, and while I was heading out of town, I took one last walk on the beach. It was right after the new year at the height of King Tides, and no one was out there-probably for good reason. I got careless and wandered too far down the beach, unaware that I didn’t have an easy escape route if there was a sneaker wave. Then a wave came after me, quickly flooding the beach. I ran and tried to scramble up a sharp cliff sand dune, holding onto beach grass while the sand beneath me turned into quicksand under the rushing sea, soaking my boots. I managed to hold on and avoid getting pulled out into the ocean, running back down the beach to safety as soon as the wave retreated. The experience left me thinking about how we never know when we’ll do something for the last time. The lyrics became personal the more I thought about this, a meditation on a relationship ending one last moment at a time.

4. Thread:

This one took a while to write. It went through several variations over the course of two years before coming together. Musically, it was the right choice to rearrange, and the layers/textures added throughout created a piece of work we were all happy with. It’s always interesting to me how some songs practically write themselves while others need to go through so many revisions. The work is always worth it, even when it feels like banging my head against a wall. Lyrically, this song is a nostalgic exploration of trauma bonding and how the same experiences can pull people in such different directions while still sharing common threads like the ability to find safety in chaos.

5. Monochrome:

I think I can speak for the band in saying this is collectively a favorite on the album for us all. We really love to perform it. With all the different layers and the build alongside the vocal line, which is so cathartic to sing. Norah’s bass line in this song is one of my favorites of all time. The lyrics deal with self-reflection, transformation, grief, and absorbing the pain of the world while trying to move through it. Having to compartmentalize empathy to be a functioning member of society, and how gross that feels sometimes, while also trying to convince myself that it’s ok not to take on all the world’s pain.

6. Small Death:

Another song that I really got stuck on for a while. What came out in the lyrics was both unintentional and a hard topic for me to take on, which made the music a challenge while trying to set the right tone. I really prefer listeners to find their own meaning in a song. Like, however you relate to our music is the correct way to connect with it. Art is given meaning by those who experience it and colored through a lens by which they have this experience-that’s part of the magic, I think. For this reason, along with the heavy subject matter, I wasn’t sure I wanted to disclose the meaning of ‘Small Death’. But I also found myself asking why not, and the answer seemed pretty clear. Survivors of sexual assault are often silenced and encouraged not to speak about the experience. It’s societal conditioning. So rather than being super vague, I thought fuck it. This song is about emotional healing after sexual assault. It’s a bit vengeful but mostly about trying to find myself after being damaged and hurt in this way.

7. Devour My Eyes:

This was the final song written for the album. In September, I took all my music gear out for one last solo trip to the coast to see what could come out of it, and ended up here. The original title was ‘you’d eat my eyes, but I still love you’, which is a reference to crows who have really taken over the city of Portland. I was surprised to see them all over the beach on the coast in Manzanita as well during this trip. But the song isn’t really about the crows. It’s about healing and grieving a relationship ending. Usually, we work on a song and develop it for a while before it comes out into the world in performance and/or a recording. Since we squeezed this one out at the end, it still has a lot of that raw emotion attached to it. For timing purposes, it was put together/developed in the studio, and the mixing process, the live version coming later. Norah wrote her bassline on the spot while we were recording, and it’s another one of my favorite bass parts she’s come up with.

8. Blood Let:

‘Blood Let’ is another one of my favorites on the album. It actually started as something completely different-a slow ballad of sorts, which was nixed by the band. There were a lot of elements that had potential, so I took on the task of taking them apart to put them back together. Now I can’t imagine it any other way. The meaning of the song is dealing with abandonment and disillusionment. Trying to reconnect my mind with my body while also wanting to dissociate.

Some of it is pretty literal and quite bloody, inspired by a medical procedure I had to have last year, which I had a difficult recovery from both physically and emotionally. I was thinking a lot about bloodletting as the process of letting go and healing, rough times in my own relationship, and my relationship to my own body.

9. X3:

Definitely the meanest song on the album and the most overtly political. I was having a conversation with a friend about getting a go bag ready and stockpiling for some kind of emergency. Feeling scared of the future and all the ways that we are heading into a dystopian society, while Mark Zuckerberg is collecting million-dollar watches and probably eating endangered species for breakfast. We are living in a crucial time where so much is at stake, teetering on the brink of collapse with democracy and the environment. A lot of powerful people are being exposed for the monsters they are, yet we’re still waiting for justice. The song is speaking to all of this while casting a times three spell (what you put out comes back times three) and a commentary about the people in the world who can’t get enough power and money while sacrificing the overall environment, quality of human and animal life to all to serve their insatiable hunger, destroying the planet as if they don’t also live here. The song hits hard and doesn’t leave much hope, just catharsis.

10. Going Dark:

Almost in response to X3, this song more softly reflects on the urge to go dark, off the grid, underground, while the world around is burning. It’s about rejecting scarcity mentality through capitalism, finding the preciousness of life outside of materialism. It’s a meditation on leaving behind what no longer serves, even while wanting to cling to some familiarity. The first lines of this song, “looking into the future, I am ready to see in the dark,” speak to a future feeling bleak, preparing for how to live through increasingly dark times. The lyrics “I’m not ready to say goodbye” are a push and pull of the acceptance and resistance of endings and the urge to disappear. The conclusion isn’t final, but it’s uncertain, which is a common theme right now: instability and uncertainty. We have to find the meaning in the day-to-day, even if it’s dark.

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