New music review with singles from Death Pill and Death Valley Girls
Our weekly fix of the best new music as Julia Mason (aka The Decibel Decoder) brings us her new music review with singles from Death Pill Silver Butterfly and Death Valley Girls How Losing Everything in the Fire Taught Me to Love Myself
Artist: Death Pill
Track: Silver Butterfly
A year on from Sologamy, the second album that landed like a blistering ball of melodic fury onto turntables via New Heavy Sounds, Ukrainian riot grrrl trio Death Pill return with a new single, Silver Butterfly.
The last time we heard from Mariana, Nataliia and Anastasiia, they were delivering some of the most urgent punk rock on the planet. Then the world intervened. Again. Following a brief 2025 tour, the band were scattered across continents by the ongoing war in Ukraine. Nataliia now lives in Australia. Anastasiia is based in Spain. Mariana remains in Ukraine. Five years into a conflict that continues to reshape everyday life, Death Pill found themselves facing a question that would finish off lesser bands: how do you keep creating when you can't even share the same room? The answer is Silver Butterfly.
The song is the first Death Pill recording built entirely remotely, assembled across three countries, multiple time zones and circumstances that would test anyone's resolve. As the band explain: "Silver Butterfly is the first Death Pill track that was created and recorded without the three of us ever rehearsing the song together in the same room. We had never worked like this before. With our previous releases, the songs had always been developed, rehearsed or recorded in Ukraine, with at least two members of the band physically working on them together at some stage."
But geography was only half the story.
"Because of Russia's continued attacks on Ukraine and the resulting power outages, Mariana and our long-time sound engineer Dmytro repeatedly had to postpone recording and mixing sessions, sometimes without knowing when they would be able to continue at all. Making music remotely across three countries is one challenge. Making it while people in Ukraine are forced to organise their lives and work around air raids, attacks and electricity cuts is an entirely different one."
And yet amazingly, none of that struggle weighs down the song. If anything, it gives it lift.
Silver Butterfly arrives on a surge of hooks, handclaps, chunky buzzsaw riffs and vocals that switch from sardonic to shred. It tears through punk, hardcore, pop and thrash without stopping to declare allegiance to any of them. Three minutes of resistance. In other words … Vintage Death Pill.
The band explain: "The past few years can feel like one long, blurred day, as if we have all become hostages to constant urgency, instant reactions and the expectation of immediate results. Life starts to resemble fast food: we consume whatever comes our way, rush through it and move on before we have had a chance to process the experience, let alone really absorb it.
"This exhausting race against ourselves gradually strips away the very basic joy of simply living. Silver Butterfly is our attempt to freeze time for three minutes and actually feel the moment again."
Against all odds, Death Pill continue to do exactly what great punk bands have always done: turn chaos and uncertainty into something you can scream along to.
* * *
Artist: Death Valley Girls
Track: How Losing Everything in the Fire Taught Me to Love Myself
Death Valley Girls' new album, Welcome to Earth, emerged from a formative moment of loss and tragedy. A devastating Los Angeles wildfire precipitated a period of turmoil for singer Bonnie Bloomgarden. The album is out Friday, October 9 via Suicide Squeeze Records. Today, the Southern California band shares the final single How Losing Everything in the Fire Taught Me to Love Myself, which confronts terror, trauma, and forward motion. The fuzzy, psychedelic instrumental builds to a commanding climax.
On the single, Bonnie Bloomgarden shares: "I spent my whole life trying to change myself, trying so hard to be 'normal' and imagining that everyone else was entitled to a level of worthiness I hadn’t yet earned. The fire forced me to stop focusing on who I needed to become and start learning how to feel safe with who I already was. After a lot of therapy, which I was very, very lucky to have access to, I realized I wasn’t just recovering from trauma— I was becoming comfortable with myself. This song is about losing everything, being terrified, and finally discovering that even when I have nothing, I have all I need.”
On the video, director Dylan Mars Greenberg elaborates: "Immediately listening to this song I wanted to create something really kinetic and I imagined Bonnie flying through the sky. I have always been enamored by older methods of effects where they did effects in camera, and my entire life I had wanted to try using rear projection. Instead of a green screen, where you’re just on a big green wall and have to add the background in post, rear projection allows the environment to be projected in real time. We actually used a slightly different process provided by the studio, the Clubhouse, that used front projection, but either way we were able to do everything in the camera. I could see Bonnie flying through the air through the eye of the camera in real time and I think that’s what really added to the dream quality of the film. My partner Glitter Macabre did Bonnie’s makeup which was also based on a few ideas I had, Glitter than created a sketch that really brought the look into a tangible space and then that sketch became a reality on Bonnie’s face. The makeup itself represents flight, the wings of her eyes are like the wings of a bird. The video is about Bonnie’s character, lost and flying alone, finding love and friendship in the sky.”
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.
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.
Death Valley Girls Live Dates
October
8 - Sacramento, CA @ Ace of Spades w/ Twin Temple
9 - Los Angeles, CA @ Scribble (RECORD RELEASE SHOW)
22 - Tourcoing, FR @ Le Grand Mix
23 - Brighton, UK @ Mutations Festival
24 - Manchester, UK @ The Abbey
25 - Glasgow, UK @ Stereo
26 - Newcastle, UK @ The Cluny
27 - Birmingham, UK @ TBA
28 - London, UK @ The Lexington
30 - Oviedo, SP @ Lata de Zinc
31 - Valencia, SP @ 16 Toneladas
November
3 - Utrecht, NL @ dB's
4 - Berlin, DE @ LIDO
5 - Hamburg, DE @ Molotow
6 - Metz, FR @ Les Trinitaires
7 - Luzern, CH @ Südpol Club
12 - Belfort, FR @ La Poudrière
13 - Nimes, FR @ Paloma
14 - Argenteuil, FR @ La Cave
17 - Cherbourg, FR @ Le Circuit
18 - Bordeaux, FR @ Krakatoa
19 - Paris, FR @ Maroquinerie
20 - La Rochelle, FR @ La Siréne
21 - Rouen, FR @ Le 106
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