Muse Chronicle

Antoin Gibson is a genre defying musician from London, England. Her unique musical style makes her stand out from the crowd. Her lyrical intensity, amplified with her emotive vocals, makes her a musical force to reckon with. Antoin is also the mind behind and the founder of the recording label Circum Sonus. Diving into the depths of dark pop and cinematic storytelling, Antoin Gibson’s music leaves a long-lasting impact on the listeners, and that is what you get with her latest release, “Venom-Laced Tears”. Read on as we dive into this dark pop sonic masterpiece to know more.

“Venom-Laced Tears” by Antoin Gibson will put you in awe with this diverse artist with captivating lyrics and hauntingly beautiful vocals.”

It is astonishing to witness Antoin Gibson’s ability to be so soft yet so powerful, and that is what we experience in her latest single, “Venom-Laced Tears”. Antoin’s masterful lyricism and introspective mind show ‘vulnerability’ and ‘control’ to be not very far apart. Listening to her other songs, it is crazy how much range Antoin has in her musicality, making her one of the most flexible and diverse artists in the modern music scene. “Venom-Laced Tears” boasts of Antoin Gibson’s hypnotic voice, lyrical genius, and Godly musical sensibilities. Listen to this masterpiece now!

We had an opportunity to speak with the artist, and here is how it went:

Question. What inspired you to create “Venom-laced Tears” as a follow-up to “Dead End”?

Well, my previous release “Dead End”, was a song that I wrote during the extreme end of burnout, and my capacity was at its limit. This was the first instance in which I experienced such overwhelming emotion during my time of creating music and so documented it into words what I was experiencing that turned into the raw track that it is.
Initially I was unable to produce the track and so the lyrics sat awaiting a time I was able to bring them into fruition of musical form. This extreme snapshot of emotional experience is one that is unsustainable for anybody so it’s a case of letting it consume you or rebuilding oneself.
Venom-laced Tears came from the latter, where tears of hardship turn from being an emotional outpour to outliving their purpose and becoming toxic to oneself. The toxicity and the need to power through is the meaning and inspiration behind the opening statement, “Shedding… Skin Deep is as far as my Concentration could care for you. Tear Drops of Venom Cleanse the Disease by Disintegrating you.”
Being a track that is layered with multiple meanings depending on how you interpret it, I mixed my knowledge of pharmacology to create this metaphor of the skin-deep level and small amount of concentration we have available for emotional extremes like burnout. The point where the emotional release of tears has fulfilled its purpose and becomes toxic are those tears when recognised as venom begin the healing process of disintegrating that unstable state of being.

Question. What made you shift the narrative from emotional collapse to something more controlled and powerful?

So in Venom-laced Tears, the serpent doesn’t represent the villain or the deceiver to me. It represents painful, necessary, biological evolution. When you are recovering from severe burnout, you have to let a past version of yourself die. You have to shed the ‘dead skin’ of your people-pleasing habits just to survive. The venom isn’t malicious; it’s just the sharp boundary you have to set to protect your own ecosystem.

The phrase ‘the Bite and the Bark’ is a direct reversal of the old saying ‘all bark and no bite.’ When you are pushed to the absolute edge of burnout, you can’t just talk about setting boundaries anymore and you have to embody the bite.
The word ‘Unhinged’ operates on two levels. In society, when you suddenly stop being a people-pleaser and start fiercely asserting yourself, people love to label you as ‘unhinged’ or emotionally unstable. But biologically, going back to my research on snakes, a serpent literally unhinges its jaw to swallow its prey whole. To me, being ‘unhinged’ isn’t about losing your mind; it’s about expanding your capacity to absolutely devour whatever obstacle is in front of you.
And leaving people ‘Side-lined’ was a deliberate phonetic tie to ‘sidewinding’ which is how snakes move to survive in the harshest, most difficult environments when they have nothing else to push against.

Question. Why did you choose a more restrained, cinematic sound instead of going fully intense or dramatic?

The tension in the track is all about contrast as that’s where the seduction and confrontation live.
To get that literal ‘serpentine’ sound, I actually weaponized something that most pop producers try to hide: sibilance. I intentionally pushed the harsh ‘S’ and ‘Sh’ frequencies in the vocal mix. Usually, you would use a de-esser to smooth that out and make it radio-friendly, but I wanted the vocals to physically hiss in the listener’s ear, mimicking a snake right at the edge of your periphery. It makes the seduction feel dangerous.

Question. The track uses strong symbolic imagery — what drew you to themes like transformation and forbidden fruit?

Honestly, the imagery isn’t me trying to be a mystic for the sake of it. It’s just the vocabulary of my life colliding. I grew up in Belfast and went to Catholic school, so even though I’m not religious now, I spent a lot of time studying ancient biblical scripture. When you are raised in that environment, stories like the Garden of Eden and the serpent are hardwired into your brain as the ultimate symbols of temptation and transformation.
But when I was 18, I moved to London to study Pharmacology at Imperial College. So, my brain works in this weird duality. Half of it processes the world through these ancient, dramatic religious archetypes, and the other half processes it through hardcore clinical science.

When I sit down to write about an extreme human experience, like severe burnout or toxic relationships then I instinctively blend the two. I look at the clinical, pharmacological reality of what is happening to the body, but I explain it using the gothic, biblical imagery I grew up with. To someone else it might look ‘esoteric,’ but to me, it’s just my two worlds crashing into each other. Ultimately, it’s a combination of life experience and my common thought processes and utilisation of language to express myself than anything hard thought out to be “esoteric”.

Question. How did you approach building the atmosphere of the song through production and sound design?

When I say I construct worlds, it comes down to how my brain actually processes music. When a concept takes me, I don’t just sit down and write a chorus to come back to it later. I write the lyrics for a track in one single sitting, from start to finish as a linear narrative, usually in about 10 to 15 minutes.
But in that brief window, I am not just seeing words on a page. I am seeing the entire finalized vision simultaneously: the musicality, the performance, the atmosphere. The rest of the production process is simply me taking that fully packaged, idealised vision out of my head and meticulously forcing it into the real world.
This is exactly why I build ‘Universes’ rather than operating within a genre. Everything I create is a connected narrative. Whenever I make a piece, I am actively considering how it fits with what I’ve done and what it will lead to. To make that world-building literal, every single track I produce features a unique, stylized intro tag: the phrase ‘Circum-Sŏnus Surrounds…’ It acts as a producer tag, but I sound-design and manipulate it specifically to match the temperature and atmosphere of that particular song. It is an audio threshold. When you hear that phrase, it is the symbol that you are stepping out of reality and entering the Circum-Sŏnus universe.
The specific world of Venom-laced Tears is one of post-burnout revitalization and the resurgence of empowerment. I actually released it intentionally at the start of Spring because the timing is cyclical—it represents rebirth, which ties right back into my inner joke of being a ‘circle’ and the Circum-Sŏnus identity. It exists as a bridge between the era of rebuilding myself, and the biting starting point for the massive plans I have for 2026.

Because I’ve played the violin since I was four, I also love taking organic, classical elements and completely mutating them. I’ll take a beautiful, organic sound and run it through heavy distortion or pitch-shifting until it sounds toxic and synthetic. That creates an uncanny, unsettling feeling in the listener and your brain recognizes something organic, but the processing makes it feel venomous. The sub-bass then acts as the confrontation; it is massive and unrelenting, designed to physically press against your chest to mimic the suffocating weight of actual burnout.

Question. Was there a specific lyric or moment that shaped the direction of the entire track?

“Narcissism Rots me to the Core; every Eve I thrive being Diss-olute.”

It is entirely autobiographical, and it operates on two levels: the psychological and the linguistic.

Psychologically, it ties back to the serpent symbolism. When I was writing my university paper on snake evolution, I reasoned that if a snake had legs while trying to swallow its prey whole, the legs would get in the way, and it would accidentally devour itself. I deduced that before I ever even knew what the ‘Ouroboros’ was. That is exactly what ‘Narcissism Rots me to the Core’ represents, the psychological Ouroboros. To survive as an independent artist, you need the ego and the delusion to believe your voice deserves to be heard. But that exact same survival mechanism, if left unchecked, will consume you from the inside out.
Then there is the linguistic side. I love embedding hidden mechanics in my lyrics. The phrasing, “every Eve I thrive being Diss-olute” is a deliberate triple entendre that basically sums up how my brain works.
First, the hyphenated ‘Diss’ is a direct shout-out to my rap roots and my previous works like Diss Topia. In hip-hop, a ‘diss’ is about asserting dominance and weaponizing your ego.
Second, ‘Solute’ leans right back into my pharmacology degree. A solute is a substance dissolved in a solvent, exactly like venom dissolved in tears.
And finally, phonetically, it creates the word ‘dissolute,’ meaning someone lacking moral restraint and indulging in vice.
So, ‘Eve’ represents the ultimate temptation: giving in to that darker, aggressive, dissolute part of myself because it feels powerful and protective in the moment. It’s the constant tightrope walk between having enough ego to survive this industry and not letting that ego dissolve who you actually are. Eve for the evening and Eve for the relation to the story of Adam and Eve.

Question. As someone running your own label, how does that independence influence your creative decisions?

It is definitely tiring, but the honest truth is that total autonomy is the only thing that makes sense for how my brain operates.
The origin of the label is actually a bit of a joke. Years ago, when I was applying for run-of-the-mill jobs, I had to do psychometric testing. My results landed on the extreme end of ‘outside-the-box’ thinking, which was visually represented as a circle. So, my running joke was, ‘I’m so outside the box, I’m in a circle.’ When it came time to release my first track, FlexAble, the distributor required me to enter a label name. I wanted to play on the ‘circle’ joke, looked around my room, saw a set of ‘Sonus’ speakers I had just bought, and typed in ‘Circum Sonus.’ It was complete coincidence that it actually translated perfectly in Latin! But after the unexpected success of those early releases, it took on a life of its own, and I incorporated it officially.
As for doing everything myself, it merges my two worlds. I’ve been playing the violin since I was four, so I’ve always had this deep creative drive. But I am also heavily academic, grounded in logic, science, and reason. Running Circum-Sŏnus independently means I get to utilize both skillsets. I put logic and reason at the core and then use creativity as the vehicle to present it.
I actually enjoy the branding, the administrative work, and the detail-oriented side of running a label just as much as writing and producing the tracks. It’s exhausting, but it ticks every single box across all my knowledge bases. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Question. What do you want listeners to feel or take away after experiencing “Venom-laced Tears”?

Honestly, I didn’t sit down with a specific demographic or an “ideal listener” in mind. My main goal was simply to create an empowering track that is accessible on multiple levels, depending entirely on how deep the listener wants to dive.

For the casual listener, I want them to just be able to put headphones on, walk through the city, and enjoy the massive, cinematic musicality of the production. If someone listens a little closer to the surface-level lyrics, it can easily be interpreted as an anthem for overthrowing a toxic relationship and finally taking control of your own life.

But for the deeper listeners of my work, the ones who want to peel back the layers then there is a highly rewarding narrative buried beneath the surface. They’ll find the wordplay, the themes of extreme burnout and self-control, and the connective tissue of the Circum-Sŏnus universe.

I didn’t engineer this for an algorithm; I just wrote what I needed to hear to survive my own environment. But ultimately, whether someone is listening for the heavy sub-bass, the toxic relationship metaphor, or the esoteric wordplay, I’m just genuinely happy if there is anyone out there who connects with and enjoys the music. Because at the end of the day, that’s what it all boils down to.

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