Death Valley Girls
- bizzarre
- 6 days ago
- 6 min read
Death Valley Girls share new single and video "Basic Witch" taken from their new album 'Welcome To Earth' out Oct 9th via Suicide Squeeze. UK tour announced.
A staple of the Southern California rock scene, Death Valley Girls are set to release their heart wrenching new album Welcome to Earth on Oct 9th via Suicide Squeeze Records, which was written after the city's devastating wildfires destroyed lead singer Bonnie Bloomgarden's home in Altadena.
Today, the band share new single "Basic Witch", which examines the loop of assigning blame. A music video featuring her strength trainer emphasises fitness as a solution for forward motion while also featuring legendary punk icon Exene Cervenka of Los Angeles punk pioneers X, widely regarded as one of the most influential voices in punk history. Death Valley Girls will tour the UK later this year.
On the single, Bonnie Bloomgarden shares:
"I had, by all standards, a very difficult and destabilizing few years—and that was before losing everything in the fire. When so much happens that is outside of your control, I think it’s a very human coping mechanism to try to assign blame and divide everything into good or bad. He’s bad, that place is good, what I did before was bad, so as long as I never do that again, I’ll be safe.
We create these systems of duality because we think they’ll protect us. But duality rarely exists in real life.
Eventually I realized that assigning blame wasn’t empowering me; it was keeping me in a loop. So I started studying that loop, and I saw that I was actually repeating a pattern I’d been living out since I was a kid—constantly trying to figure out who was safe, who was dangerous, who was good, who was bad. It was exhausting.
The more I looked inward, the more I realized that the only place I could really find power was within myself. I’m not saying we’re responsible for everything that happens to us. I’m saying we are responsible for what we do with what happens to us. For me, that meant taking radical accountability—not in a ‘blame the victim’ way, but asking myself: Where was I giving away my power? Where was I putting people on pedestals and making them the priority? Where could I have had stronger boundaries? What could I do differently moving forward?
I realized I had been doing this my whole life without even knowing it. This song is about taking control of your own boundaries. It’s about taking responsibility for your choices without needing blame, fault, victim, or perpetrator to consume you. Because when you stop looking outside yourself for someone to blame—or someone to save you—you get your power back."
On the video, Bloomgarden added"The concept for the video is pretty funny, imagine Karate Kid meets Quadrophenia :)
It’s important to me to highlight people/ businesses we love when we have an opportunity to use our lil platform. After the fire I felt super weak, so I started taking a strength training class from Candy in Echo Park. In a few short months I felt and was stronger than I have ever been! When i find anything that helps me I want to share that intel with the world, so we started working on a music video idea! I wanted her to train someone who was getting picked on like in Karate Kid. So we asked Henry Mortenson to direct and Exene Cervenka to star in the video with her friends Skating Polly, and Annette. It turned into a super cute family video. A real good time :)"
The road to Death Valley Girls’ Welcome to Earth begins in the ashes of California’s Eaton Fire. After losing her home in Altadena and soon after her beloved dog Tommy, lead singer and songwriter Bonnie Bloomgarden confronted questions that resisted easy answers: What survives catastrophe? What remains after loss? How do you rebuild a life when the things that once defined it are gone? The album that emerged from those questions is among the most intimate and searching works Death Valley Girls have ever made.
Throughout the band's body of work, they have treated music as both celebration and search party. Albums like Glow in the Dark, Darkness Rains, Under the Spell of Joy, and Islands in the Sky transformed their space rock sound into a vehicle for spiritual inquiry, finding flashes of transcendence amid everyday chaos. But Welcome to Earth feels distinct from its predecessors. It focuses less on escaping the world and more on understanding how to remain connected after devastation.
What emerged was not a psych-punk record about loss, exactly, but about connection: the invisible threads linking people, animals, memories, landscapes, and lives across time. The album's title functions as both a greeting and a reminder, a welcome from the natural world to a species that has largely forgotten its place within it. Again and again, the songs return to the possibility that separation may be humanity's most persistent illusion.
That idea of connection extends beyond the songs themselves. After the fire, Bloomgarden found herself held aloft by the musicians who now make up Death Valley Girls: drummer Bailey Chapman, guitarist Laena Myers, bassist Alana Amram, saxophonist Sarah Safaie, and keyboardist Gregg Foreman - who devastatingly passed away not long after.
They carried her through grief, through the band's first tour after the loss, and a year for her to be ready to write again. Their presence shaped not only the spirit of Welcome to Earth, but its sound: a more expansive, communal energy that feels inseparable from the people who helped bring it into being.
"I don't think this record could have been made with any other group of people,"
Bloomgarden shares. Tragically, the album also stands as the final Death Valley Girls recording to feature Gregg's contributions.
Yet for all its weighty questions, Welcome to Earth is remarkably joyful. "Plant Magic" turns renewal into a communal celebration. "Basic Witch," featuring Seth Bogart, transforms heartbreak into hard-won self-awareness. "Message From the Venus Flower" and "I Love You" reimagine grief as evidence of an enduring connection rather than an ending.
Musically, the album remains unmistakably Death Valley Girls: exuberant, melodic, curious, and gloriously open-hearted. Girl-group harmonies drift through hazy psychedelic passages; voices gather into communal chants; choruses arrive with the buoyancy of a collective sing-along.
That communal spirit echoes throughout the album's many voices: twenty-three guest singers appear across the record, including a children's chorus whose bright presence lends the songs a fresh sense of wonder. Longtime collaborator Laura "The Kid" Kelsey returns throughout the album, as well as Little Ghost who was equally central to the process, contributing backing vocals throughout the record, creating the album artwork, and remaining a constant creative presence both in the studio and on the road. Welcome to Earth also features acclaimed jazz vocalist and multi-Grammy-nominated artist Gretchen Parlato.
What makes Welcome to Earth so moving is its refusal to separate the cosmic from the deeply personal. Bloomgarden searches for meaning everywhere, following those threads wherever they lead. The result is Death Valley Girls' most intimate album, but also their most expansive: a record that looks directly at loss and somehow emerges more open to wonder. In the end, Welcome to Earth proposes a radical idea disguised as a danceable rock-and-roll record. It suggests that healing begins not when grief disappears, but when we recognize how deeply connected we have always been.
Photo by Sheva Kafai
Tour dates
Oct 2 - Santa Cruz, CA @ The Catalyst w/ Twin Temple
Oct 4 - Portland, OR @ Crystal Ballroom w/ Twin Temple
Oct 5 - Vancouver, BC @ The Vogue w/ Twin Temple
Oct 6 - Seattle, WA @ The Neptune w/ Twin Temple
Oct 8 - Sacramento, CA @ Ace of Spades w/ Twin Temple
Oct 9 - Los Angeles, CA @ Scribble (RECORD RELEASE SHOW)
Oct 22 - Tourcoing, FR @ Le Grand Mix
Oct 23 - Brighton, UK @ Mutations Festival
Oct 24 - Manchester, UK @ The Abbey
Oct 25 - Glasgow, UK @ Stereo
Oct 26 - Newcastle, UK @ The Cluny
Oct 27 - Birmingham, UK @ TBA
Oct 28 - London, UK @ The Lexington
Oct 30 - Oviedo, SP @ Lata de Zinc
Oct 31 - Valencia, SP @ 16 Toneladas
Nov 3 - Utrecht, NL @ dB's
Nov 4 - Berlin, DE @ LIDO
Nov 5 - Hamburg, DE @ Molotow
Nov 6 - Metz, FR @ Les Trinitaires
Nov 7 - Luzern, CH @ Südpol Club
Nov 12 - Belfort, FR @ La Poudrière
Nov 13 - Nimes, FR @ Paloma
Nov 14 - Argenteuil, FR @ La Cave
Nov 17 - Cherbourg, FR @ Le Circuit
Nov 18 - Bordeaux, FR @ Krakatoa
Nov 19 - Paris, FR @ Maroquinerie
Nov 20 - La Rochelle, FR @ La Siréne
Nov 21 - Rouen, FR @ Le 106
