Where do your dreams go when you die
They’re still happening on some other timeline
You should still be here
We hold you
Nex Benedict, a nonbinary teen, took their own life in 2024 after enduring severe bullying at school. Their loss, much like Matthew Shepard’s before it, made the world feel suddenly smaller and far more cruel. For trans and queer youth, such deaths can tear through the shared imagination, exposing how easily fear and hatred can wound lives still in the tender process of becoming. Within every young person lives a universe of possibility: future friendships, loves, art, discoveries, and ways of seeing that no one else could ever bring. With each life cut short, whole constellations darken…yet in remembering them with grief and care, queer youth also inherit a stubborn light, the belief that their lives are precious, singular, and worth protecting.
Portland’s Darkswoon (Jana Cushman, Norah Lynn, and Rachel Ellis) felt that loss personally, and Antivenom carries the force of that feeling with unusual clarity. Written in response to Benedict’s death, the single channels anguish into something shared, purposeful, and protective. As a queer band, Darkswoon approaches the subject not as distant observers, but as people living within the same atmosphere of danger, tenderness, and vigilance. The song becomes a tribute, a vigil, and a warning all at once, a piece of music that gathers pain into form and then pushes it outward with grace and intent.
A steady compressed snare drives the track with a stern, almost ceremonial insistence, while synths spread in broad, beautiful sheets and bass holds everything to the earth. The arrangement carries darkwave muscle, post-punk tension, dream-pop drift, and shoegaze scale, yet the band never sounds trapped in a category. Instead, they shape a language suited to the occasion: music as memorial, music as shield, music as a place where rage can stand beside care without diminishing either.
The song imagines a spirit continuing beyond the visible frame, somewhere beyond the hard facts of loss, giving the track its emotional reach. Private grief becomes collective remembrance. The dead are held close, their truth protected, their unfinished time carried forward by those still here. When the guitar rises in the final stretch, it lands with the force of accumulated feeling, finally finding air, a release that feels earned because the song has spent its whole duration holding so much in suspension.
Directed by Sarey Martin, the deeply touching video deepens that sense of communal mourning through a concept both devastating and beautiful. It presents a montage of queer luminaries from across the rainbow spectrum seated for portraits in a setting that recalls a prom; their smiling, radiant bodies gradually shifting into masked and costumed figureheads of loss, embodiments of those taken by bigotry, depression, and violence. The effect is quietly shattering. What begins as a scene of celebration slowly becomes a funeral rite – a grim tribute to those who never got to see a prom, a graduation, or any of the ordinary benchmarks of adolescence. The spirits seem to whisper to one another across the frame, as though memory itself has become a living chorus.
Watch Antivenom below:
Darkswoon have been building toward work like this since Jana Cushman’s 2014 solo project evolved into a trio with Rachel Ellis and Norah Lynn. Across Year One, Bind, and Bloom//Decay, they have widened their scope and sharpened their identity. Antivenom, the title track from their forthcoming April album, suggests a group reaching deeper into its purpose. In a moment when trans and queer youth are so often made to carry unbearable weight, Darkswoon answer with a song that helps carry some of it back.
Antivenom is out on April 3, 2026. Order the album here.
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