Death Valley Girls

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.