Death Valley Girls have been a staple of the West Coast psych-rock scene for a full decade now, and their fifth album Island in the Sky aims to prove that they still have plenty of ground yet to cover together. The second single from the record arrives today which sees the four-piece venturing into the realm of Hammond-organ-laced gospel—albeit shaded by their uniquely dark and deeply psychedelic sensibilities. Lyrically, “Sunday” captures the sense of personal reinvention that threads through the new LP to match the new sounds.
“Recently I realized I have been numbing, medicating, intellectualizing, and avoiding my pain and feelings for most of my life,” vocalist Bonnie Bloomgarden shares of the track. “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!”
Arriving with the track is a video directed by Arturo Baston which perfectly illustrates the song’s off-color journey with imagery familiar to Disney’s Alice in Wonderland filtered through a bad-trip perspective before the (live action) band enters the picture for the rousing climax. Check out the visual below, and read on for a brief Q&A about the single with Bloomgarden.
How do you see the song’s message of reinvention feed into the spiritual connotations of the title “Sunday”?
That’s so cool, I didn’t think of that! I use fake words when channeling melodies and songs, and it actually started out as “Some Day.” But that felt pretty hopeless. So I figured I should make it “Sunday.” That way there can be an official day to start over, to remember to try harder if I forget—and why wait ’til Monday?
Did the idea to channel gospel music in the instrumental come before or after the lyrics came together?
This record is kind of different than any other I’ve written in the sense that we were channeling a concept rather than a sound. We wanted to write a record for our future selves so that we wouldn’t have to make the same mistakes, or go through the same pain, in our next lifetime that we went through in this lifetime. This song is the first time I really wrote—or even shared—how hopeless I’ve felt, and feel sometimes. I only received the first half when I wrote it in the forest with [drummer Rikki Styxx], and the second half came when we all played it as a band for the first time. I think we all naturally felt like we needed to be guided to what to do when you’re feeling deep despair. And it turns out, you gotta keep moving!
The video’s animation clearly nods to Alice in Wonderland—what connection did you see between the song and that movie?
Our friend Arturo Baston came up with the concept for the video. I think the idea of being in a bizarre dream world trying to find meaning, and your way home, fits in perfectly with everything we’re trying to say in this record. He’s the best!
The lyrics to the song feel very relevant to the popular New Year’s resolution mindset—did you have this in mind when you decided to release the track this early in the year?
In some ways, yes! I think I’ve spent the last two years paying the price and suffering the consequences of not processing pain and trauma. I got super sick for six months, and have been on a real journey since then. I really wanted to share what I’ve learned as soon as possible. Which is, you can’t heal if you don’t process. Processing moves emotions through you, and out of your body. Numbing and avoiding pain is good for a bit, and I wish I could do it forever, but if you don’t feel your feelings you store them, and that can make you sick—it made me sick! I wish we were all taught to sit with discomfort, that it’s OK to feel blue. It will pass, but only if you feel it.
