Jan 11, 2023
By Mark Redfern
Photography by Neto Velasco
LA goth-rock band Death Valley Girls are releasing a new album, Islands in the Sky, on February 24 via Suicide Squeeze. Now they have shared its latest single, “Sunday,” via a music video. Arturo Baston directed the animated video. Watch it below.
The band’s Bonnie Bloomgarden had this to say about the “Sunday” in a press release: “Recently I realized I have been numbing, medicating, intellectualizing, and avoiding my pain and feelings for most of my life. Over the past few years I learned you have to feel and move through your feelings or they get stuck, and then you become a vessel or container for all the feelings you are trying to avoid! If you acknowledge, feel, and process them, you get to release and move them out of you! This song is to honor that process! Feel your feelings, be so sad you wanna cry forever, and then move on, you gotta keep moving!”
In September, Death Valley Girls previously shared the album track “It’s All Really Kind of Amazing.” When the album was announced in November they shared its second single, “What Are the Odds,” which was one of our Songs of the Week.
In a previous press release, Bloomgarden elaborated on the album, which was initially conceived while she was bed-ridden with a mysterious illness from November 2020 to March 2021: “When I was sick, I started to wonder if it would be possible to write a record with messages of love to my future self. This was really the first time that I consciously thought about my own suffering and what future me might need to hear to heal. I struggled so much in my life with mental health, abuse, PTSD, and feeling like I didn’t belong anywhere. And I don’t want anyone—including my future self—to suffer ever again. I realized that if we are all part of one cosmic consciousness, as we [Death Valley Girls] believe, then Islands in the Sky could serve not only as a message of love and acceptance to myself, but also from every self to every self, because we are all one!”
The band’s last album, Under the Spell of Joy, came out in 2020 via Suicide Squeeze. It featured songs “The Universe” (one of our Songs of the Week) and “Hold My Hand” (another one of our Songs of the Week).