Death Valley Girls share a Basic Witch video featuring Exene Cervenka of X

Death Valley Girls have released a video for Basic Witch, and the guest in it is Exene Cervenka of X. The song is the second single from Welcome to Earth, the Los Angeles band's new album, which Suicide Squeeze releases on 9 October.

The record came out of a bad stretch. Singer and songwriter Bonnie Bloomgarden lost her home in the Altadena fire, an event that followed soon after the death of her dog Tommy, and Welcome to Earth was written in that aftermath rather than at a safe distance from it.

Bloomgarden has described the song as being about what she did with the wreckage. She had already had a difficult and destabilising few years before the fire, and says that when so much happens outside your control, it is a very human coping mechanism to assign blame and sort everything into good or bad.

She came to see that as a trap rather than a defence. Assigning blame, she says, was not empowering her but keeping her in a loop, and studying the loop showed her she had been repeating a pattern since childhood: constantly working out who was safe, who was dangerous, who was good and who was bad. She calls it exhausting.

What she landed on instead was what she terms radical accountability, which she is careful to distinguish from blaming the victim. She is not saying people are responsible for everything that happens to them, she says, but that they are responsible for what they do with it, and the questions that follow are about where power was given away and where boundaries could have been firmer.

The band around her is a six-piece: Bloomgarden with drummer Bailey Chapman, guitarist Laena Myers, bassist Alana Amram, saxophonist Sarah Safaie and keyboardist Gregg Foreman. Putting Cervenka in the video connects the band to the Los Angeles punk lineage they have always worked from, and the rock release is listed on the release calendar.