Death Valley Girls – Message From the Venus Flower
“Message From The Venus Flower” keeps circling one idea: love isn’t just a feeling, it’s a place you can still visit even after someone’s gone. Bonnie Bloomgarden wrote it after her dog Tommy died, not long after she’d already lost her home in the Eaton Fire.
The song is the first single from Death Valley Girls’ new album Welcome To Earth, out October 9 on Suicide Squeeze Records, following 2023’s Islands In The Sky. “I was broken. I had officially lost everything to 2025,” Bloomgarden has said of the period after Tommy died. She’s credited her bandmates, guitarist Laena Myers, bassist Alana Amram, saxophonist Sarah Safaie and drummer Bailey Chapman, with helping her back into writing, along with keyboardist Gregg Foreman, who passed away this spring shortly after the album’s sessions wrapped. It’s his final recording with the group.
Sonically it’s a hard turn from the band’s usual fuzzed-out psych, built around a tight funk groove that leans more ’80s than doom boogie: insistent bass and drums, guitar and synth, the occasional sax cutting through. The lyric reframes grief as continuity, the idea that whatever gave you that feeling once can still give it to you again, in a different shape. I like that the song doesn’t ask you to feel sad for her, it asks you to dance a little instead.
I don’t know how you’re supposed to grieve two losses and still make something this danceable, but Death Valley Girls managed it.
North America
- Oct. 9 / Los Angeles, CA / Scribble (record release show)
Europe
- Oct. 22 / Tourcoing, France / 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, Spain / Lata de Zinc
- Oct. 31 / Valencia, Spain / 16 Toneladas
- Nov. 3 / Utrecht, Netherlands / dB’s
- Nov. 4 / Berlin, Germany / LIDO
- Nov. 5 / Hamburg, Germany / Molotow
- Nov. 6 / Metz, France / Les Trinitaires
- Nov. 7 / Luzern, Switzerland / Sudpol Club
- Nov. 12 / Belfort, France / La Poudriere
- Nov. 13 / Nimes, France / Paloma
- Nov. 14 / Argenteuil, France / La Cave
- Nov. 17 / Cherbourg, France / Le Circuit
- Nov. 18 / Bordeaux, France / Krakatoa
- Nov. 19 / Paris, France / Maroquinerie
- Nov. 20 / La Rochelle, France / La Sirene
- Nov. 21 / Rouen, France / Le 106
