INTERVIEW: HER NEW KNIFE
Photo Credit: Juliette Boulay
Interview by Olivia Schnur, Amy Lewczuk, and Elizabeth Plese
We were able to grab Her New Knife for a conversation a couple of weeks ago when they supported Julie with They Are Gutting a Body of Water at Paradise Rock Club. The band is made up of four members, Ben Kachler (guitar), Elijah Ford (drums), Edgar Atencio (vocals, guitar), and Carolina Schooley (bass), and have recently released their EP entitled, ‘chrome is lullaby’. We got into influences, the process of making their songs, modded guitars, and medieval humiliation masks with the Philly-based shoegaze/post-punk act.
Olivia Schnur (OS): You guys started off in the DIY scene in Tallahassee, playing in the surrounding cities of Tampa and Miami. Do you think playing at these house shows, and the kind of DIY venues alongside these bands influence your sound at all?
Elijah Ford (EF): Yeah, I would say so, there’s a lot of really good Florida bands. Like there was this band called Bees and Enormous Tigers, which Peter is actually here tonight. He was in that band. He and Edgar were in a band previously to Her New Knife and was really inspired by them. And bands like Palomino Blond and Bloom Dream, and Not Milk, all the Florida bands, are really closely tight-knit. And I think that we all pick and choose things from each other and grow off of each other. Oh yeah, Dime too.
Elizabeth Plese (EP): How did you guys all meet?
Edgar Atencio (EA): Ben and I went to high school together. So we’ve all known each other for a long ass time. But I met Elijah my freshman year of college, just like in the dorms. We started playing in a different band, but, yeah, we were friends for like, maybe two or so years before we started this band. And then I met Carolina through this radio station that we used to work at FSU called WVFS. And then I just kind of wanted to be in a band with people that I knew I could be chill with. I asked Carolina to join, and I knew Ben was, like, coming to school, like, soon so I asked him to join.
EP: Quick sub-question, did you guys have a radio show? What did you do at your radio station?
Carolina Schooley (CS): We were DJs. Yeah, there were radio shows that we did. They were mostly genre-based.
EA: I used to do the metal show, and then the blues show.
OS: That’s definitely a contrast. Okay, just a question for [Ben]. I saw the guitar you were playing during purepurepure, and is that like a 12-string guitar? It kind of looks like a harp.
Ben Kachler (BK): It’s a piece of shit. It’s like a knockoff of an old Danelectro sitar. There’s supposed to be a sitar bridge in there, and then the strings above resonate. But we took it out and just had it normal and plucked the resonator strings instead of letting them resonate.
Amy Lewczuk (AL): We saw some show flyers you guys have opened for, like waveform*, Mannequin Pussy, and Ethel Cain. How was it, at the time, working with these bands coming from the DIY scene in Tallahassee; what was that experience?
EF: The Mannequin Pussy show was canceled.
CS: That show got canceled. The night before.
EF: We were literally, like, at his house rehearsing for that show, and then we got the news it was canceled.
CS: We had just finished up rehearsing this, like, Nelly Furtado cover. We were so excited to play it.
EF: That was when we were going to play douglasland.v1 for the first time too.
EA: Ethel Cain is funny, though, because she’s from Tallahassee and she was at our very first show; before Ben joined the band, it was just like us three. She was just walking around, I was like, “Hey, love your music.”
EF: She was pretty local at that time, though, she hadn’t- she blew up, really, really fast.
OS: That was the first EP; I think I was looking at the–
EF: Well, even before that, this was like a year before that. She was like, maybe as big as we are right now, maybe like 30,000 monthly listeners or something like that.
EP: Still, though you sounded very composed, I would not have been composed at all. So, props to you for that one.
EA: You just got to say hi like a normal person.
EP: You guys also played with some of our, like, personal favorites here in Boston, Paper Lady, Trophy Wife.
BK: Yo! That’s [Kenzo]. You’re Paper Lady. You should get in on this one.
EP: Awesome, wait, do you play for the band?
Kenzo Divic (KD): For Paper Lady. Yeah.
EP: Oh, awesome. What instrument do you play?
KD: I play keys and guitar.
EP: That’s awesome. We’ve also Gollylagging was another one.
KD: Oh hell yeah, they rock.
OS: They’re so good.
EP: Would it be terrible to ask you to compare scenes? You know, you played the Philly scene. You played the Boston scene. Is there anywhere you like the best?
OS: Does your experience differ at all?
EA: I don’t really know a lot about the Boston scene, to be honest.
EF: We’ve only very briefly played here. We played some fried-ass show in Boston, or not even in Boston, in uh–
CS: Cambridge.
EF: Yeah, Cambridge, and then we played here. So that was it, honestly, no idea. They just kept telling us to turn down; they would just go up on the stage and turn the amps down.
EP: What about Philly versus Tallahassee?
EA: Philly music scene is definitely a lot more varied. Tallahassee, the demographic is mostly just like college students, ages 19-22/23ish. A lot of the music there at the time that we were playing was, you either had the hardcore punk scene, which is kind of separate–
CS: Yeah, Tallahassee has a really good small hardcore scene.
OS: Did not know that!
EA: It’s honestly really lit, but it was either like that or… the indie music, white-guy-type-beat.
EF: Cover band, Strokes band.
OS: We got a couple of those here.
AL: Oh boy, do we know!
EF: Any college town, I’m gonna have the bros that just want to play at the frat parties.
EA: There were a lot of really cool bands. There were some really great and unique bands, like Peter’s band, for example. But after the pandemic, a lot of those bands either moved away or a lot of the older DIY houses stopped doing shows. So it was just harder to have the scene, so it was just nice to move to Philly and, like, do the music that we do and meet so many different people and just like, feel good about experimenting.
OS: When was that, by the way? Your move to Philly?
EA: Elijah and I moved August 2022.
OS: Okay, okay. How did you find your place there?
EA: We had a lot of help.
EF: Oh yeah, honestly, when me and Edgar first started putting music out, I was posting it on Reddit, and in the same time I was posting it, I saw Full Body 2 had posted one of their first singles. I listened to that and was like, “Whoa, this band’s awesome,” and I DMed them and was like, “You guys are awesome,” and then they were like, “oh, we’re moving to Philly”, and then we were like, “oh, we’re thinking about moving to Philly, what’s that like?”, because they’re from Rochester so it’s pretty close. Then same with Doug from TAGABOW.I had just been going back and forth with him, asking about what Philly’s all about, and where we should move and stuff. Whenever they would come play in Pensacola or Atlanta, we would go to the shows and talk with them. So, by the time we moved up there, we, like, knew people already. Which was really helpful.
OS: So you had your bearings before?
EF: Yeah, yeah.
AL: So you guys are under Julia’s War Records. How did you come to be repped by that record label?
OS: I mean, that’s, that’s, run by TAGABOW.
AL: Yeah, it’s run by TAGABOW. So how did that happen?
EF: I mean, we just kinda already knew them.
CS: It wasn’t a super official thing. It was kind of just an agreement.
OS: It was just kind of like the relationship was already there.
EA: Yeah, well, I think Julia’s War, in its inception, was mainly a tape label. And would have these bands that [Doug] liked or the bands from Philly that were, you know, already kind of near them. He just put a lot of his own money into, like, printing like tapes for them. So it was really just one of those things.
EP: For sure. So first tour, correct me if I’m wrong too because– well did Instagram stalk you, sorry. But the first one I saw was the tour with Palomino Blond. How was that as your first experience, or was it your first experience touring?
EA: We had done weekenders before? I think that was probably like five shows, something like that, but it was nice. I mean, we didn’t really go too far, it was mostly just like cities in the Northeast. We– we’ve known Palomino Blond since, like, we were in Florida. Carolina’s long-time friends with, like, the singer in Miami, so it was just kind of like touring with friends.
OS: I saw you guys played in New York City on a Perfectly Imperfect flyer with TAGABOW DJing, because usually Perfectly Imperfect has dance/electronic music sets with full bands playing [too]. Do you think electronic music has influenced you guys at all; what way do you think the band is more experimental than when it first started off?
EA: I feel like a lot of what I listen to now– honestly, no, for a couple years, the stuff I mostly listen to is, like, electronic music, or club music, just as a whole. And I don’t make any of that stuff, but I definitely do listen to it, and, like, just the way things are layered kind of does influence my songwriting. I don’t really listen to, like, a lot of the new shoegaze honestly. But yeah, no, I love that stuff. There’s so many good electronic artists up here in the Northeast, especially in Philly. Purity Filter, that’s a big one.
EF: Hooky.
EA: Vertigoaway, who was originally from Tallahassee, then moved to Philly.
EF: I booked their first live show ever, Vertigoaway.
EP: Wait, you were in booking?
EF: Yes…
OS: I feel that. I’m in “booking”. It’s just, you know– I’m helping people out.
EF: It was at Ethel Cain’s house.
AL: Oh!
EP: Wow, that’s crazy.
OS: Woah.
EP: You said you don’t listen to shoegaze. What artists do you guys listen to?
EF: We actually just put out a playlist through Audiotree, it has a lot of what we’ve been listening to recently.
EP: Oh, cool.
EF: I don’t know. I’ve been listening to a lot of like– I don’t know, recently I’ve been listening to more electronic music like Boards of Canada, and like Aphex Twin, and Four Tet, more atmospheric stuff.
BK: I just been kind of listening to the radio for a bit. Been liking the radio a lot.
AL: What drew you guys to make the style of music that you guys do; what brought you guys together in that, what drew you to it? That was a really philosophical question.
EA: When we first started, Elijah and I were just really into the idea of making heavier music, not that we were in just like some dude-indie-rock band. So, yeah, we just wanted to make like loud guitar stuff. We didn’t really think too hard about genre or anything, but it definitely sounded like slowcore. But I feel like the more we played, and the more stuff we did, and the more songs we wrote, I kind of just wanted to start, like, making it noisier and, like, not percussive. I’m really into this guy called, um– this is definitely one of my biggest artistic inspirations. But his name is Arto Lindsay. He’s this guitarist-songwriter from New York who was the guitar player in that band DNA, which is like a No Wave band from the late ’70s. But his solo career is just really crazy because he’s just makes these, like, fucked up pop songs and sings in Portuguese. And he plays this 12 string fucked up guitar, and he doesn’t– he’s not a guitar player, he doesn’t really know how to play guitar, he just scratches it and sings and like does shit. But it’s like, really beautiful and intentional and cool.
OS: Like beautifully incomprehensible.
EA: Just like mad expressive, which I think is what I hope the new stuff sounds like.
OS: You were saying heavier noise? Because I know you kind of put out, I don’t know if you would call it like a “nightcore” EP, but it was like your songs that were kind of remixed. Is that– You just wanted to alter it to make it noisier?
EA: Well, that was something that just came about because Ben made some “nightcore” remixes of our songs to tune to. Like songs that we weren’t gonna play during the set; he just remixed them. And I had a bunch of little songs and demos, and we wanted to just put something out in the meantime, before this, and so we just compiled them.
AL: Can you guys talk a little bit about your songwriting process? How does that go down for you guys?
EA: I don’t know. I mean, I write a riff and like a vocal melody, and then I send it to them, and then we get together after playing it for, like, a little while it just kind of becomes the song.
AL: With some quick, quick, quick last thoughts.
EP: Yeah makes sense. It does seem like they’re wrapping up, so we should probably wrap up soon.
EP: Oh yeah, this is just a question I wrote, and it’s gonna be annoying. How did you decide on your profile picture on Instagram?
EA: I was really into the idea of old torture masks, like humiliation masks, like the metal shit that you’d put on like prisoners.
EF: I think that one specifically is a Portuguese mask of shame.
EA: Yeah, shit like that. I don’t know. I was just, like, into it. I would look at different pictures and the adornments on them. I just thought were, like, looked cool. There was a period of time where I really wanted an album cover to be just somebody wearing a mask, like, wearing no clothes, just crawling around or something. But yeah, that’s it.
EP: Yeah, that sounds cool. I honestly was expecting an answer like, “I don’t know, just looked cool,” so.
EA: I mean, yeah, pretty much.
EP: I mean, if it looks cool, it’s cool.
OS: I think that’s, that’s yeah– they’re definitely shutting off the lights on us, but thank you guys.