L.A. WITCH ANNOUNCES DOGGOD LP OUT APRIL 4
SUICIDE SQUEEZE
L.A. Witch emerged from the booming Southern California rock underground with a sound that fuses retro psychedelia and fearless dark-wave. Today, the band announces a new full-length, DOGGOD, out April 4, 2025 via Suicide Squeeze Records. The album was recorded in Paris, and finds the band expanding the limits of their formula while pondering spiritual themes of love and devotion. L.A. Witch has also shared the single “777,” which emphasizes the band’s ability to blend drive and dreaminess. The song is equal parts hazy and visceral, offsetting punk guitars and a motorik groove peppered with guitar harmonics. The end result is as sun faded as it is spunky.
On the track, member Sade Sanchez shares: “A part of the energy in our new album is a result to being able to record in a different city that we all love, which is so different from home. Recorded at Motorbass studios in Paris, 777 is considered to be an “angel” number. It’s a song about the willingness to die for love in the process of serving it or suffering for it. It’s about loyalty to the very end. Filled with chorus and guitar dive, it was one of our favorite songs to record and we can’t wait to play it live.”
L.A. Witch have also announced a run of upcoming spring North American tour dates with support from DAIISTAR and Choke Cherry. See details below.
L.A. Witch have always exuded an aura of effortless cool, whether it manifested as the Americana noir and laconic back-to-basics rock n’ roll of their self-titled debut or the blistering austere adventurism of their sophomore album Play With Fire. The band—comprised of Sade Sanchez (guitar/vocals), Irita Pai (bass), and Ellie English (drums)—began as an informal affair, but the sultry and beguiling reverb-draped songs they created caught on with the public, moving the project beyond the insular space of the band’s friends and peers in Southern California into the broader world. On their latest album, DOGGOD, the trio push their craft beyond their previous creative and geographical confines, opting to craft the material in Paris, recording the tracks at Motorbass Studio on the Rue de Martyrs. DOGGOD explores broader swaths of sonic terrain, employs a greater arsenal of tones, and probes larger existential and cosmic themes, all while retaining the band’s signature sense of the forbidden, the forsaken, and the foreboding.
DOGGOD is a way of tackling the universal riddle tangled in the spiritual nature of love and devotion. “I feel like I’m some sort of servant or slave to love,” says Sanchez. “There’s a willingness to die for love in the process of serving it or suffering for it or in search of it… just in the way a loyal, devoted servant dog would.” The album title is a palindrome fusing together DOG and GOD—an exaltation of the submissive and a subversion of the divine. It’s a nod to the purity of dogs and an acknowledgement of their unconditional love and protective nature that’s at odds with the various pejoratives associated with the species. “There is this symbolic connection between women and dogs that expresses women’s subordinate position in society,” Sanchez explains. “And anything that embodies such divine characteristics never deserved to be a word used as an insult.”
Across the entirety of DOGGOD, L.A. Witch never strays from their muse. On “I Hunt You Pray,” Pai lays down a hypnotic bass throb while English employs a cyclical krautrock groove and Sanchez paints a picture of an abandoned dog on the roadside, alone in the night, living as both the hunter and the hunted. On “Eyes of Love,” the band harnesses the meditative mid-tempo repetition, deconstructed chords, and esoteric ruminations on love, death, and spirituality that made Lungfish such a beloved entity. It reinforces the parallel between the unwavering love seen in the eyes of a dog and the self-sacrifice of a savior. On “The Lines,” the band takes the propulsive pulse of post-punk and adds an extra dose of chorus to the mix. “Chorus is a modern effect that comes from the idea of replicating the slight pitch discrepancies of a choir. There is a shimmering quality which ties us back into this spiritual godly feel,” Sanchez explains. Coupled with the addition of organ and applied to a brooding minor-key melody, the song simultaneously conjures both the holy and the sacrilegious. The title track “DOGGOD” bears perhaps the strongest resemblance to the material found on the previous album Play With Fire, pitting lean and mean guitars against a scrappy rhythm section and dreamy vocals. But whereas their previous album was a rallying cry to carving one’s own path, “DOGGOD” adheres to the album’s “til death do us part” theme, going so far as to describe a level of submission that crosses over into dangerous and unhealthy places, with Sanchez singing “hang me on a leash / ‘til I wait for my release.”
Ultimately, DOGGOD is a perfect encapsulation of L.A. Witch’s approach. It’s simultaneously romantic and menacing, reverent and profane, a celebration and a lament. It finds the thread between the past and present, taking familiar sounds and revamping them for the modern age. But it also heralds a new era for the band, looking beyond the Kodachrome memories of midcentury America and digging deeper into the medieval and gothic energies of Paris and beyond, all while probing inward at a sullied heart. Suicide Squeeze is proud to release DOGGOD to the world on April 4, 2025.
Tour Dates
4/19 – Sacramento, CA @ The Starlet Room*
4/21 – Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios*
4/22 – Vancouver, BC @ The Pearl*
4/23 – Seattle, WA @ Tractor Tavern*
4/25 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge*
4/27 – Denver, CO @ Hi-Dive*
4/29 – St. Paul, MN @ Turf Club*
4/30 – Milwaukee, WI @ Shank Hall*
5/1 – Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall*
5/2 – Detroit, MI @ Lager House*
5/3 – Toronto, ON @ Longboat Hall*
5/4 – Montreal, QC @ Bar “Le Ritz” PDB*
5/6 – Troy, NY @ No Fun*
5/7 – Cambridge, MA @ Sonia*
5/9 – Brooklyn, NY @ TV Eye*
5/10 – Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s*
5/12 – Washington, D.C. @ DC9*
5/13 – Carrboro, NC @ Cat’s Cradle*
5/14 – Atlanta, GA @ The Earl*
5/16 – Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall*
5/17 – Austin, TX @ Hotel Vegas*
5/18 – San Antonio, TX @ Paper Tiger*
5/20 – Albuquerque, NM @ Juno Brewery*
5/21 – Phoenix, AZ @ Valley Bar*
5/23 – Los Angeles, CA @ Lodge Room*
6/13 – Santa Cruz, CA @ Moe’s Alley^
6/14 – San Francisco, CA @ The Chapel^
6/20 – Las Vegas, NV @ Swan Dive^
6/21 – Pioneertown, CA @ Pappy & Harriet’s^
6/27 – San Diego, CA @ The Casbah^
6/28 – San Diego, CA @ The Casbah
*with DAIISTAR
^with Chokecherry
L.A. Witch
DOGGOD
(Suicide Squeeze)
Release Date: April 4, 2025
Artist Links
Background Photo Credit: Marco Hernandez
SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: CHOKECHERRY – MESSY STAR
