Death Valley Girls share new song, "Basic Witch"

"Basic Witch" follows lead single "Message From the Venus Flower", and arrives alongside a music video featuring Exene Cervenka of Los Angeles punk band X. It's the second preview of a collection of songs which were written in the aftermath of the Altadena fires that destroyed singer Bonnie Bloomgarden's home.

"I had, by all standards, a very difficult and destabilizing few years—and that was before losing everything in the fire," Bloomgarden says of the single. "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," she continues. "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."