Some pop songs arrive dressed as party tracks and then quietly tell you they were written in the middle of a breakup. Brian Walker’s VENOM is one of those. It is Track 7 on his debut LP PASSIO and the ninth single he has pulled from the project, and it sits right in that commercial-pop lane that wants a chorus you can hum after one listen.
Walker grew up on a farm in East Kingston, New Hampshire, turned his childhood bedroom into a studio, and still writes, produces, and mixes his own records there. That DIY loop shows. He has more than 750 New England shows behind him, including the Berklee Performance Center and Mohegan Sun, playlist adds on Spotify’s New Music Friday Indonesia, Fresh Finds, and Fresh Finds: Pop, and spins on 92.5 The River. His catalog has passed 650,000 Spotify streams, with Lookin’ Like My Wife alone north of 230,000. The PASSIO rollout has already given us Dear Jane (Iggy Magazine called it an “Ode to Melancholy”) and Before the Roof Caves In, plus IMMA GET MINE and its runner-training video. VENOM is the next chapter, and it comes with a music video that works as a prequel to the Wolf Girl story from Before the Roof Caves In.
He wrote VENOM after WHO NEEDS WHO, when he realized he did not want to become the person a relationship was turning him into. The first thing that showed up was the “Ven-num-num-num-num” topline. He thought that would be the chorus. As the production grew, it settled into a post-chorus instead — the kind of earworm that sits after the hook and refuses to leave. The lyric idea is simple and sharp: it is hard to roll sevens when your heart is venom. Negative feeling sitting in the chest makes the good stuff harder to land. That is the whole thesis, and he built the track around it rather than dressing it up with extra mythology.
Commercial pop in 2026 still lives and dies on that balance: radio-ready structure, a repeatable phrase, and enough personal stake that it does not feel like a focus-group exercise. Walker is working that line. Farm-kid bedroom studio, self-mixed records, a connected video universe, and a debut album that is almost finished — four more songs left to close PASSIO. If you like pop that is clean on the surface and a little bruised underneath, this is the one to sit with.
What do you think of VENOM and the PASSIO story so far? Drop a comment.
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