Portland’s BendreTheGiant capture depression and suicidal ideation with startling honesty, clarity, and care on “i went to jump in front of a train…,” a brooding standout from their debut album ‘Swollen Eyes’ that turns our darkest thoughts and a moment of crisis into a spectacular act of empathy and endurance. In conversation with Atwood Magazine, frontman Ben Estrada opens up about the song’s deeply personal origins, his vision for its raw, breathtaking music video, the grief and hard-won hope running through ‘Swollen Eyes,’ and the community, collaboration, and love that keep him and his band moving forward.

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Content Warning: This article discusses depression, suicidal ideation, and themes of self-harm.

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Stream: “i went to jump in front of a train…” – BendreTheGiant

Take a leap of faith, or you can be brave…

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Survival can feel like the body making a decision before the mind knows how to follow.

One foot forward, then another, until the worst thought loses its grip for one more night.

BendreTheGiant’s soul-stirring song “i went to jump in front of a train but a couple was making out and i didn’t want to ruin the mood so i went home” lives inside that fragile, frightening space between wanting to disappear and finding a reason, however small, to stay. Heavy, aching, dark, and deeply human, the song transforms a moment of crisis into a cathartic act of endurance – a brooding indie pop reckoning with fear, tenderness, and the brave, brutal work of sticking around.

Crack my skull open, what would you find?
Packed my bags and made up my mind
Paid all my bills just in time
Come on feet let’s leave it behind
I don’t think you meant
to leave me behind
But some people just born to die

Take a leap of faith
Or you can be brave
Cower in fear
And Stick around for another year
Keep me safe
We don’t have to leave this place
Seek and you’ll find
I’ll right my wrongs this time
Crack my skull open what would you find
Papier mache and a made-up mind

Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering the music video for BendreTheGiant’s “i went to jump in front of a train…,” a visceral, pulse-heavy standout from the Portland band’s recently released debut album, Swollen Eyes (out now via Tender Loving Empire Records). Led by vocalist, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Ben Estrada alongside songwriter, producer, and keyboardist Delos Erickson, bassist Eli Hansen, drummer Nate Hansen, guitarist Avery Scanlon, and woodwind player Ben Harris, BendreTheGiant make music with open arms and a restless spirit. Featured on NPR’s Tiny Desk “Top Shelf” series and named one of Portland’s “Best New Bands” by Willamette Week, the group have built a sound that flows freely between funk, R&B and neo-soul, brass-blasted grooves, folk textures, synth-smeared atmosphere, melodic indie pop, and the heavy moodiness of the Pacific Northwest.

That genre-fluidity gives Swollen Eyes its shape and its pulse: The album moves like a late night spent trying to outrun old ghosts, slipping from heartbreak to humor, from lush arrangements to exposed nerves, from the dancefloor’s heat to the bedroom-floor ache that waits after everyone has gone home. It’s BendreTheGiant’s biggest and most collaborative project to date, but for all its color and movement, the record keeps returning to the same intimate center: How do we carry loss, live without clean endings, and stay open to whatever light might still find us?

“i went to jump in front of a train…” offers one of the album’s most bruising answers.

Sludgy, moody, and unrelenting, it pushes BendreTheGiant’s sound into darker terrain, letting thick bass, pulsing drums, and shadowy synths wrap around a lyric that is almost devastatingly plain in its honesty. The song doesn’t dress depression up in metaphor for the sake of distance; it looks directly at the body in crisis, the mind at war with itself, and the strange, sacred interruption that can pull a person back from the edge.

Estrada is open about where the song came from, and that openness is part of what makes it land so hard. “i went to jump in front of a train…” aches because it refuses to sensationalize its subject. Instead, it gives language to a feeling too many people have known and too few songs capture with this much clarity, fear, compassion, and care.

“I wrote this song while in a deep depression, feeling very suicidal,” BendreTheGiant’s frontman tells Atwood Magazine. “Through the writing process I tried to convey a message that might help someone in my shoes, or at least share my perspective on these feelings. The verse is my headspace, and the chorus is what I needed to hear.”

“I made the demo without lyrics in late 2024, Eli then took that demo and created a more solid foundation to build a song around. After listening to Eli’s version I sat down and spent a whole day writing the verse and chorus, I then brought it to Delos to help with some final ideas and we finished it together. We recorded this song partially at Echo Hill Studios with Edwin Paroissen, and partially at the Hallowed Halls, but primarily at our producer Justin Yu (Yu Kiatvongcharoen)’s home studio. As we were working on the album, we thought this song paired really well with the track ‘Do You Remember Me,’ and we created a seamless transition between the two. This song allowed us to explore different studio recording concepts and practices and forced us to get creative in our production style.”

That creative restlessness can be felt in every inch of “i went to jump in front of a train…”: The song trudges forward with a bruised, hypnotic pulse, its heaviness coming not from volume alone, but from the way each instrument seems to press down on the same wound.

The bass has weight. The drums feel locked in a march. The keys and synths hover like heat off pavement at night, while the guitars and electronics smear the edges just enough to make the whole track feel unstable, restless, and alive.

The opening lyric is as stark as it gets: “Crack my skull open, what would you find? / Packed my bags and made up my mind.” Estrada drops us into the middle of a mind already past the point of ordinary distress, where practical details and catastrophic thoughts sit side-by-side. “Paid all my bills just in time” lands with chilling clarity, not because it explains everything, but because it captures the eerie orderliness that can exist inside emotional chaos. Even at the edge, there is still a person trying to be considerate, trying to make sense, trying not to leave a mess.

Then comes the lyric that pulls the song into motion: “Come on feet, let’s leave it behind.” Plainspoken and devastating, this line makes the body feel almost separate from the mind, as though movement itself has become an act of rescue. Estrada himelf speaks to that physicality directly, explaining, “The inspiration for this lyric comes from the song ‘Come on feet’ by Madlib persona Quasimoto, and as someone who deals with chronic depression, I’ve felt myself saying this statement many times. It conveys the feeling of forcing your body to move through life, or in this case death.”

This line acts as the song’s emotional hinge. The verse is bleak and claustrophobic, full of finality and self-erasure: “I don’t think you meant to leave me behind, but some people just born to die.” It’s a painful thought rendered without ornament, and BendreTheGiant let it sit there in its full weight. They do not rush to soften it; instead, the music keeps grinding forward, pulsing through the ache until the chorus arrives like a hand reaching through the dark.

“Take a leap of faith, or you can be brave / Cower in fear and stick around for another year.” The genius of the refrain lies in its inversion. Where “leap of faith” so often suggests courage, Estrada twists the phrase until staying becomes the braver choice. “I liked using the phrase ‘take a leap of faith’ in a negative sense, that you are severing your connection with our reality,” he says. “I wanted to convey the message that life is full of fear and you are brave to stick around and continue to try and better yourself.”

That is the song’s great act of compassion. It does not pretend fear goes away, nor does it dress endurance up as triumph. It allows “cower in fear” and “be brave” to occupy the same breath, recognizing that, for those living inside depression’s grip, the two can be nearly impossible to separate. Staying can look like fear. Staying can feel like defeat. Staying can also be courage at its most elemental.

By the time Estrada sings, “Keep me safe, we don’t have to leave this place,” the song has shifted from a private crisis into a plea for shelter. The words are spare, but the feeling behind them is immense: A desire to remain, to be held in place, to make it through the night without needing the whole future solved. BendreTheGiant don’t offer closure here, because closure would feel false. What they offer is presence, and in the world of Swollen Eyes, presence is everything.

The final image – “Papier mâché and a made-up mind” – leaves the listener with a body that feels fragile, patched together, breakable, and still somehow standing. That contradiction is where “i went to jump in front of a train…” lives and breathes. Heavy yet tender, grim yet strangely cathartic, the song holds its darkest thought up to the light and refuses to let it be the end of the story.

The music video takes that same ache and makes it impossible to keep at a safe remove.

Directed by Delos Erickson, Anthony Johnson, and Ben Estrada, it opens in blur: City lights melted into circles of color, sidewalks and streetlamps fallen out of focus, the world rendered as haze before it becomes recognizable. For nearly thirty seconds, we don’t know where we are, or what we’re looking at. Then the picture starts to sharpen, and so does the dread.

We see Estrada moving through downtown Portland, alone and small against places that feel loaded with danger: Train tracks, the side of a bridge, the top of a skyscraper. But the video doesn’t over-explain or dramatize. It follows, it watches, and it lets these spaces do the talking, turning the song’s inner crisis into a real walk through real streets, where every light, railing, platform, and empty stretch of concrete seems to carry its own terrible weight.

That rawness is the point. Shot by childhood friend and videographer Anthony Johnson, the video feels found rather than staged – like footage captured in the middle of a night no one knew how to stop. Its rough edges are part of its power: The old-camera grain, the blown-out light, the heavy shadows, the city’s natural glow. Instead of polishing the pain into a clean visual metaphor, BendreTheGiant let the world look exactly as it looked, and that choice gives the video its immediacy.

“This video was heavily inspired by guerrilla filmmaking and on-the-street productions,” Estrada says. “We wanted the viewer/listener to be in the perspective of a search party trying to find a friend, the character would be the subject and then the area they’re in would be the subject, to show the impact of what it’s like to lose someone. We wanted the chorus section to be filled with energy and share the character’s mental breakdown and coming to terms with life and their reality, and the video ends with a message of hope and an outlet to reach out to get help.”

“We chose locations that reflected the song’s themes of loneliness, desolation and emptiness. The video was shot entirely on an old Sony video camera and no post-production coloring or lighting was done, we wanted the film to be raw and a true reflection of what we saw when filming, and wanted to utilize the environments and lighting at each location uniquely.”

After the tracks, the bridge, the rooftop, and the neon-lit panic of the chorus, BendreTheGiant’s video lands on a sign posted along the bridge: “There is hope.” It’s a small thing in the frame, but not a small thing in the story. After a song and video spent inside the crushing weight of wanting to leave, those words arrive as a simple, necessary interruption – a reminder placed in the real world, exactly where someone might need it most.

It doesn’t solve the ache, and it doesn’t erase the night. But it gives the ending a handhold, and that’s the gift “i went to jump in front of a train…” keeps offering again and again: Not a perfect answer, not a clean escape, but one more reason to stay.

That idea – staying, even when staying feels impossible – sits at the heart of BendreTheGiant’s debut album, Swollen Eyes.

The record doesn’t treat pain like a straight line out of the dark; it moves in waves, with each shift in sound carrying its own emotional weather. BendreTheGiant let the music breathe like a life still being lived in real time: Messy, searching, alive to beauty, and honest about the damage people carry even when they’re dancing through it.

“The emotional center was less an idea but more just the reality in which Delos and I were living in when writing these songs,” Estrada shares candidly. “Almost every track is a direct result of a feeling we had or an experience we went through and we just poured it into the music.”

Musically and emotionally, Swollen Eyes is a tour-de-force. The album feels made by people who needed these songs first – not as performance, but as shelter, release, and proof of life. Press play and you can hear a band pushing themselves toward a bigger vision, finding color inside heavy feelings, and refusing to flatten their story into one mood or one sound. BendreTheGiant are chasing catharsis wherever they can find it: In groove, in grit, in tenderness, in humor, in the voices of friends, and in the simple fact of making music together.

That togetherness might just be the key to this band’s magic. Swollen Eyes may be full of loss, but it’s also full of connection – the kind that keeps a person tethered when the world gets too loud, too empty, or too much. “Making this music and being a part of this musical community has truly saved my life and changed my outlook on everything,” Estrada says. “I’m extremely grateful to be able to share this music and share the stage with all my best friends. We gave it our all on this album, and we are going to continue giving it our all as we continue on our journey.”

In the context of this journey, “i went to jump in front of a train…” hits like the album’s rawest nerve.

In the full world of Swollen Eyes, the song feels like a wound and a turning point at once: A place where the album’s grief, fear, love, and need for connection all come crashing into focus. The music video deepens that impact by giving the song a body, a city, a path, and finally, a sign. In just three and a half minutes, BendreTheGiant take a thought many people are scared to name and turn it into a spectacular act of empathy. They make crisis feel visible without making it feel exploitative. They make staying feel brave without pretending it’s easy.

And maybe that’s why “i went to jump in front of a train…” lingers long after it ends. It understands that survival doesn’t always look grand. Sometimes it’s one foot forward, then another. Sometimes it’s a stranger’s love in the wrong place at the right time. Sometimes it’s a sign on a bridge, a friend looking for you, or a song that says the words you needed before you knew how to say them yourself.

Watch Atwood Magazine’s exclusive premiere of BendreTheGiant’s “i went to jump in front of a train…” music video below, and dive into our full conversation with Ben Estrada below as he opens up about depression, collaboration, Portland’s music community, the making of BendreTheGiant’s debut album, and the brave, brutal work of sticking around.

By the time “i went to jump in front of a train…” lets go, survival has returned to the body: One foot forward, then another, until the worst thought loses its grip and the night becomes one more thing we made it through.

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:: stream/purchase Swollen Eyes here ::

:: connect with BendreTheGiant here ::

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Stream: ‘Swollen Eyes’ – BendreTheGiant

A CONVERSATION WITH BENDRETHEGIANT

BendreTheGiant (Ben Estrada): We are music lovers first and foremost, we strive to make music that we would listen to, and don’t attach ourselves to any one genre. BendreTheGiant is Benjamin Estrada as singer/songwriter/producer, Delos Erickson as songwriter/producer/keyboardist, Eli Hansen on bass guitar, Nate Hansen on drums, Avery Scanlon on guitar, and Ben Harris on woodwinds.

BendreTheGiant: Swollen Eyes is our most collaborative and biggest project to date, It was over a year in the making and truly showcases our dedication to songwriting and production, and our love of music. Delos, Justin, and myself crafted these tunes over a year. With every record, Delos and I try to imagine our dream arrangements, recording techniques, and try to capture that. We have come a long way from reworking old demos, to now making new songs and bouncing ideas off of each other.

BendreTheGiant: If you want to hear the funkiest cry for help you’ve ever heard, listen to “Make It Stop.” If you are interested in songs that highlight some of our band members, “Don’t Wake Me” has a sexy guitar solo and breakdown reminiscent of Pink Floyd, and “Nobody Knows” features a solo from Delos, on top of a groovy beat switch.

BendreTheGiant: As a band, we have many different eclectic music tastes, and I feel you can hear that in the music. I grew up listening to Stevie Wonder, Chicago, Earth Wind & Fire, Frank Ocean, and Thundercat to name a few. I’m most excited about collaborating with new people and growing as a band and a collective.

BendreTheGiant: The emotional center was less an idea but more just the reality in which Delos and I were living in when writing these songs, almost every track is a direct result of a feeling we had or an experience we went through and we just poured it into the music.

BendreTheGiant: I wrote this song during a deep depression and I didn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel but I wanted to, so I wrote it as a way of telling myself to keep going. The title came from a post on a Reddit thread and I just felt a huge connection to the sense of wanting to end your life but not wanting to inconvenience the people around you.

BendreTheGiant: I liked using the phrase “take a leap of faith” in a negative sense, that you are severing your connection with our reality. And I wanted to convey the message that life is full of fear and you are brave to stick around and continue to try and better yourself.

BendreTheGiant: The inspiration for this lyric comes from the song “Come on feet” by Madlib persona Quasimoto, and as someone who deals with chronic depression, I’ve felt myself saying this statement many times. It conveys the feeling of forcing your body to move through life, or in this case death.

BendreTheGiant: We were heavily inspired by guerrilla filmmaking and on the street productions. We wanted the viewer to have the perspective of a search party trying to find a friend, with the character being the subject and then the area they’re in being the subject, to show the impact of what it’s like to lose someone. We wanted the chorus section to be filled with energy and share the character’s mental breakdown and coming to terms with life and their reality, and the video ends with a message of hope and an outlet to reach out to get help.

BendreTheGiant: We wanted to grab the listener’s attention immediately, and bring them into the world we created. “Swollen Eyes” was actually the final song written and recorded for the album, and when we had all the songs ready it just felt like it summarized the feeling of the album. Swollen eyes in sadness, in tears of joy, in nights of drunken laughter or cries, or in the days that follow the sleepless nights.

BendreTheGiant: In a way “Do You Remember Me” is the precursor to the emotional head state I was in while writing “i went to jump…” Those feelings of self-hatred and imposter syndrome that are hinted at in “Do You Remember Me” are then fully exposed and pushed to a breaking point in the following track.

BendreTheGiant: We wanted the album to feel like a progression in energy, it has its peaks and valleys but all the songs blend into one solid piece. Like I said earlier, we aren’t tied to any specific genre so blending styles and sounds into an overarching narrative allows us to have songs like “i went to jump…” and “No New Friends” on the same album and still artistically stay true to our own voices.

BendreTheGiant: My personal favorite songs are “i went to jump…” and “Swollen Eyes.” My favorite lyrics would have to be “I feel so useless when I’m not creative, and when I’m hated I feel understood” from the song “Voice Inside My Head,” because I feel that very heavily. Another favorite lyric of mine is “You’d be surprised we even made it out alive, and you even doubted that we’d be here out tonight” from the song “Family Matters,” because this lyric is very close to my heart and goes out to my siblings.

BendreTheGiant: It has taught me to cherish the moments you have with your loved ones, and the people you hold close. Say hello to your friends, check in on each other, and just be kinder to people in general. We are all going through it.

BendreTheGiant: I hope people take away what they need from it, whether they be an emotional connection or just a way to get through the day and have some fun music to listen to. We put so much love and effort into this album and I hope it shows. Making this music and being a part of this musical community has truly saved my life and changed my outlook on everything. I’m extremely grateful to be able to share this music and share the stage with all my best friends. We gave it our all on this album, and we are going to continue giving it our all as we continue on our journey.

BendreTheGiant: Katy & the Nullsets, Tenants, The Apricots, Palo Sopraño, Night Heron and greaterkind. These are all PNW bands that have been at the top of all my playlists lately and they all deserve more attention!

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:: stream/purchase Swollen Eyes here ::

:: connect with BendreTheGiant here ::

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Stream: “i went to jump in front of a train…” – BendreTheGiant

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