Kevin Bronson on May 26th, 2020

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“I have a new album coming out in the fall and this is not it,” Alexa Melo says by way of introduction to her new song “Digital.”

Instead, the song — a punk rocker as fierce as anything she’s released — is the lead track on “DEMOÏTIS,” which she calls “a collection of abandoned, indie-rock demos that I produced, mixed and mastered by my lonesome over the span of many years and deemed unworthy of ever seeing the light of day.” First, judging from “Digital,” it’s a good thing she rethought their worthiness. Second, it will make fans even more curious for “Red Noise,” the album of dark pop/trip-hop/rock she intended to release this summer as the follow-up to her 2018 EP “Mute.”

Of course, like the release plans of many an artist, the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench into that. Suffice to say, though, it’s not the first time the mercurial singer-songwriter-producer and do-it-yourselfer faced a career hurdle. Consider this brief timeline of her career:

2009 — At age 14, Melo is signed to Interscope. After five long years of the label’s attempts to mold her into a pop artist, the relationship ends in 2014.

2015 — She independently releases her self-titled debut album. But a few months into promoting it, Melo undergoes emergency surgery on her vocal cords. She sits idle.

2016 — While in Culver City recuperating, she starts recording covers of classic rock and alternative songs and posting them on YouTube. They garner over a million views in less than a year.

2017 — Melo moves to San Francisco and writes and records “Mute.”

2018 — In, April, while filming videos for all four songs on “Mute,” Melo releases a collection of Radiohead covers, because why not? In October, “Mute” and its four videos are released.

2019 — Melo writes and records a huge batch of material, culling from it the tracks for the album “Red Noise” and discarding the rest.

2020 — With “Red Noise” delayed, and realizing it’s been two years since she released anything, Melo revisits the discarded tracks, mixes and masters them, and announces “DEMOÏTIS,” with plans to release one song per week until the full album is out July 10.

“I fell back in love with these ‘demos’ and am quite stoked that these songs will finally get a little moment to be heard before the new album enters the ether,” Melo says. “One thing I’ve picked up in all this global weirdness is that life is too short to be precious. I realized that I’d regret not sharing my art.”

“Digital” is an all-DIY affair, produced, mixed and mastered by Melo, who now splits her time between L.A. and the Bay Area — and she made the video by herself, too, while in quarantine.

||| Stream: “Digital”