Death Valley Girls Reveal “Basic Witch” Single & Video

Southern California’s Death Valley Girls are set to release their heart wrenching new album, Welcome to Earth, on October 9th via Suicide Squeeze Records, which was written after the city’s devastating wildfires destroyed lead singer Bonnie Bloomgarden‘s home in Altadena. The band have now shared their 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 (X). Death Valley Girls will be hitting the road again from October with tour dates in the US, UK and EU,

“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.” (Bonnie Bloomgarden)