Death Valley Girls’ Bonnie Bloomgarden talks rocking the dead and more ahead of tonight’s show at the Replay Lounge

Calling Death Valley Girls a garage-rock act undersells it. While the music on the Los Angeles quartet’s second full-length, ***Glow in the Dark, has a lo-fi aspect to it, there’s definitely a whole lotta death rock goin’ on.

The band’s video for “Disco” is a freaky pagan affair, featuring legendary L.A. DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, and directed by Troma ingenue Kansas Bowling, and will instantly drag you into Death Valley Girls’ aesthetic. The Pitch spoke with the band’s frontwoman, Bonnie Bloomgarden, by phone from L.A. about Death Valley Girls’ cult appeal and the appeal of cults.

The Pitch: There’s a lot of different people on Glow in the Dark, as well as a bunch of guest stars. How did that affect the sound of the record?

Bonnie Bloomgarden: I’m not sure how much it affected the sound of it, as much as how all the magical people who were on it affected what we were writing about. A few of the songs we had recorded before, but the majority of the songs we recorded in two days. That sort of core group of people – we had been building to where the record was, and then those people who were there for the majority of the record made it what it is.

Most of the songs were done in studio, then?

We wrote most of them in the studio. Basically, what happened was that we played a show at the natural history museum for a mummy exhibit, and we kind of realized that these mummies had been at a Chicago museum since 1890. As far as we knew, they’d never heard rock ‘n’ roll, so we were thinking, “How do you introduce rock ‘n’ roll to, like, mummies?”

We just wrote all these songs and afterward, it was so meaningful – the process – we were just like, “We have to go record this,” and it became the whole concept of the record. It just changed our whole concept. Like, how important is a record? How important is music? It should introduce the dead to rock ‘n’ roll, or even wake them up, if possible. That’s where the original intent of the record came from, and it grew from there, of course.

I know the band has been influenced by a variety of things, like the film Switchblade Sisters, but this seems to be going even deeper into the occult.

Oh, yeah. For sure. Totally. We are definitely into the occult. We believe rock ‘n’ roll and the occult go hand-in-hand. We believe the songs come from outer space. We don’t even believe that we write them – like, I know I don’t write the words. The day that we went into record all the songs, I wrote all the songs, and there’s no way that would be possible.

We believe that all the songs are already existing in the ether, and you just either get lucky and pull them down, or you don’t. We didn’t invent this concept. I think it’s kind of like Henry Miller’s concept that words or writing is just floating above you, and you just have to tap into it and pull it down, for sure.

Is there something about the way that L.A. is between an ocean and a desert, or either in a mountain or a valley, contribute something to the weird way the city and the occult influence rock ‘n’ roll?

That’s interesting. I never really thought about it like that. It’s really hard to say, because to us, rock ‘n’ roll is our religion. We idolize Iggy, and Alice Cooper, but I think it’s just who we are and how we met. That’s what Glow in the Dark is about – it’s about certain people that are like-minded and into the sort of things we talking about right now – you can tell who they are by the fact that they glow in the dark. You can see each other that way. It’s a message, like, “If you’re one of us, come be with us.” The band is just one facet of our whole gang mentality.

Death Valley Girls
with the Mr. & The Mrs. and Drugs & Attics
The Replay Lounge
Monday, September 19