Q&A: L.A. Witch’s ‘DOGGOD’ Album is a Pendulum of Love and Power
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY KIMBERLY KAPELA ☆
Photo Credit: Rhyan Santos
WHEN SUBMISSION FEELS DIVINE — L.A. Witch have always lived in the tension between opposites — romance and ruin, elegance and grit, the sacred and the profane. Their third full-length album, DOGGOD, distills that tension into its very name: a palindrome that flips dog and god into mirror images. One word carries centuries of reverence, the other a history of insult, yet together they speak to the dizzying push and pull of love.
For Sade Sanchez (guitar, vocals), it’s a pendulum swing — between submission and power, vulnerability and euphoria. Love can make you feel like a dog, loyal and exposed, but also like a god, radiant and untouchable. That duality pulses through DOGGOD, a record that stretches L.A. Witch’s shadowy garage-rock roots into post-punk precision and gothic atmospherics.
DOGGOD is a philosophical prism. “I feel like I’m some sort of servant or slave to love,” Sanchez says. “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.” That emotional submission becomes the heart of the album.
Sanchez, Irita Pai (bass) and Ellie English (drums), recorded the album in the legendary Motorbass Studio on Paris’ Rue de Martyrs.
The palindrome of the title itself — DOGGOD — serves as both subversion and exaltation. It fuses the sacred and the profane, the divine and the animalistic. It’s a reclamation of symbolism: of the dog as both deity and outcast, as protector and pariah. “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.”
That inversion runs deep in the sound, too. DOGGOD embraces restraint, carving space into songs rather than simply layering on more. There’s still the band’s signature brooding mystique, but now it’s sharpened by icy basslines, precise guitar work and echoing drums.
Lyrically, the album swims through the murky waters of submission and servitude, love and longing. There’s a recognition of pain not as weakness, but as transformation. Each track is a vignette of contradiction — romantic yet dangerous, religious yet blasphemous.
While L.A. Witch have never shied away from the shadowy corners of rock n’ roll, DOGGOD feels more elemental. Paris gave them a new lens that magnifies both the sacred and the carnal.
DOGGOD finds transcendence in the tension between light and dark, between being the god and the dog, and discovers new power in surrender. It's L.A. Witch at their most introspective and outward-reaching, bound together by a haunted heart and a howl in the night.
Photo Credit: Marco Hernandez
LUNA: Thank you for talking to Luna. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. For any readers who aren’t familiar with you yet, what inspires your artistic style and sound?
SADE: Between the three of us, there's a pretty mixed bag of influence and inspiration, especially just with music alone, I think we're all pretty open to all kinds of music. We go through phases where we'll get heavily into one genre and then switch to another. A huge influence is my roots in classic rock or psych or punk. Everyone listens to everything.
LUNA: You are fresh off the heels of your new album release DOGGOD. Can you talk about the inspiration behind the album and what themes or emotions you explore?
SADE: It's titled DOGGOD, so a lot of the songs are love songs. The DOGGOD idea comes from having two words that are completely opposite, like dog being something that can sometimes historically be frowned upon or looked down upon, and then God, obviously I don't really need to say that. What that means to people, by putting those words together brings them to a mirror image of each other. For me, when you're in love, sometimes there's this feeling of having to be submissive or vulnerable and kind of in the place of a dog, but at the same time, you have this euphoric feeling and feeling powerful. It’s like a pendulum.
LUNA: I would love to know more about the creative process. What did a typical recording and songwriting session look like for you? How did the songs evolve from the initial idea to its final version?
IRITA: For this album, we had to write it in a pretty limited amount of time, because we booked the studio in Paris. We had everything set up and we focused on it really hard. We practiced every day. We met up every day, just throwing out ideas, or people would come up with parts. It was a very collaborative process where we all got together.
LUNA: Sonically, DOGGOD feels both heavier and more experimental in moments. What creative risks did you take during the making of this album?
SADE: I know that there's more space in this record. I think that that's something that personally, I previously felt, because I always felt the need to fill in the space. This time, I was more comfortable — whether it be the vocal melody or even the guitar — just allowing more musical space and being confident with that, so not having to feel like proving myself through doing more technical stuff on the guitar. It's something that I would say is different from the other albums.
ELLIE: I would say the same for me. I tried to pay more attention to not trying to fill up everything. That's maybe a maturity thing. I hope so.
LUNA: Since Play With Fire was released in 2020, how do you feel you’ve evolved as artists and storytellers? In what ways did that growth shape this new body of work?
SADE: I think allowing other other things to be influenced from other things that aren't just music, whether that be art or literature. A lot of the songs were written when I was spending time in Paris, so I think on a subconscious level, you get inspired by your surroundings whether you like it or not. It just becomes a part of your subconscious mind. Allowing different influences has allowed for evolution, and obviously with time, you grow, you evolve, you learn and you get new experiences. We're playing pretty and we're always jamming, and even if we're not playing shows or touring, we're still working on music. I think that shows too.
LUNA: Are there any messages or narratives you hope younger women and femme-identifying listeners especially can connect with or find power in DOGGOD?
SADE: I hope that we can be an example and just inspire people of all kinds. I feel like I can speak for the three of us when I say that when we were younger, there weren't a lot of female musicians and artists. If there were, there were very few. I think that it's really cool that we found each other. I feel like things have really changed on many levels, even taking a company like Fender Guitars, who now puts way more females in their advertising. I think that things are really starting to change. Festivals have more female fronted lineups and headliners. I hope that we are someone that can inspire people to pick up and play and start to learn and not care about what other people think. It's all in your head and what you make of it.
LUNA: Do you have a personal favorite song on the album—one that feels closest to your heart or most revealing of who L.A. Witch is right now?
ELLIE: I really like “777,” but I also really love “Eyes Of Love,” that one's very unique to me and I like playing the drums on them.
SADE: I really like “777” as well. It's super fun to play live, also “Icicle” and “Lost at Sea” I think is one that’s hard not to get a little bit emotional.
IRITA: My favorite is “I Hunt You Prey” because I like jamming on it and in the middle of the set, you can relax.
LUNA: Looking back from your self-titled debut album to now, what’s one thing you’ve held onto—and one thing you’ve let go of creatively?
ELLIE: I really like playing heavy and loud, so I took 20 steps back with that. For something new, being more gentle and letting more space in.
SADE: I could agree with Ellie to allow the space in, and also not having limits on ideas and source of inspiration, and also having more discipline when it comes to writing and making it a point. Even on days when you don't feel like writing, or you feel like you're not going to get anything done, even if you spend the whole day just practicing one chord or a riff, and you don't even end up using it, it's still a step towards writing a song. The more you do it, the better you get at it.
LUNA: How has the tour been treating you so far, any fun or memorable experiences?
SADE: We just feel lucky to be able to be back on the road and to connect with fans — old fans, newer fans. Playing shows is always really fun and being able to rediscover cities. Obviously we've toured a lot over the past few years, and a lot of the cities we have visited in the past. Things change, and so over time, you keep visiting a city, and the city changes and the people do. It's cool to have that chance to reconnect and to be exposed to all that and to share what we've been working on. We get feedback from people and see how they're affected or influenced by it. It’s a super cool exchange. We love it.
IRITA: We came out of not touring for a long time. Our last album was during covid, and we were really unsure if people would come to the show. When we toured, some of the shows were selling out and we were selling all this merch that we totally weren't prepared for, so we had to get more merch made and shipped. It's been really cool talking to the fans and hearing about them, and just all the support and love that we get.
LUNA: Do you have any pre show or post show rituals or regimens that you do to help boost your performance or ground yourself?
SADE: We definitely do a little powwow slash fake prayer thing. It’s like a big hug. It's a cool way to co-regulate with each other before we get on stage. We'll write a set list a few minutes before we go on, and we'll pace and talk about how nervous we feel.
LUNA: What’s fueling your fire right now—musically or personally—that’s pushing you into this next chapter?
SADE: I'm pretty excited about going to Europe since it's been a while. I've been seeing a lot of travel stuff lately on the internet, and I'm getting stoked on that. I’m excited to go to Dublin for the first time. That's getting me pretty fired up.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the rest of the year look like for you that you would love to share with Luna?
ELLIE: Nervous.
SADE: I would say I would agree with being nervous, but I think it's because it's not even so much like where we're at in our career or music. I feel pretty good about that. I think it's more like the state of the world that's freaky. It's hard to have a normal life with all the stuff that's going on, because there's this weird guilt to exist because of what's happening in the world. It's hard not to get down on that kind of thing. Our job is to share art and to bring people up in these kinds of times. We just have to stay strong for other people and hope that music gives them hope, or somewhere to escape to, or somewhere where we can create community.
