Her New Knife is a Philadelphia-based band that emerged in 2020, steadily gaining attention after playing alongside Julie, Water from Your Eyes, Cowgirl Clue, and They Are Gutting a Body of Water. They released their first EP Destroza in 2021 and their most recent EP chrome is lullaby in 2024, later rereleasing a remixed collaborative version in 2025.

What intrigues me the most about them is their distinct sound. The chord progressions and picking patterns consist of note combinations that feel dissonant, using these sounds in a manner reminiscent of banging metal pipes together or digging through dirt with your bare hands. The delivery of lyrics is almost confessional, minimal yet piercing, so that each layer in isolation should sound vulgar in theory, yet together become unexpectedly beautiful and compelling to listen to. Their songs range from tracks that feel dark and subterranean like purepurepure, 12r, and Mouth to ones like vitamin beauty, Emilio, and Piled Up that are more airy, but still carry the same undercurrent of wrongness and coarseness. I think their variety of tone is why I enjoy their music so much, you can hear the experimentation in each new project. Many draw comparisons of their work to that of bands like They Are Gutting a Body of Water or SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, as they all exist within the genre of noise rock/shoegaze. Her New Knife’s philosophy for the music they make is that they play mostly unreleased songs live at their shows, evolving the sounds into entirely new entities each time. By the time these songs are recorded and released, they've become the most layered, intricate, and fully realized versions of themselves.

purepurepure is my favorite song of theirs. The song builds through the gradual intensification of guitar distortion, paired with the calm vocals unraveling into a desperate, repeated cry of the same lyrics. This is one of the only released songs they performed live when I saw them, and the unreleased tracks followed this same architecture, leaving me eager for recorded versions. The band's performance itself was very entertaining and enormously loud. Singer and guitarist Edgar Atencio inhabited the stage with a beautiful, masterful laziness, playing and singing in a way that perfectly mirrored the unhurried intensity of their music. Drummer Elijah Ford played relentlessly, and bassist Carolina Schooley and guitarist Ben Kachler were magnetic together, creating a push and pull between the two instruments that felt alive.

Knifeplay, Glixen, and trauma ray were awesome as well. The sequence in which the bands performed felt less like a lineup and more like a narrative to me, producing an emotion difficult to name. It was a small venue, which drew me closer to everyone in the room, the audience and the artists, forging a strange intimacy that left me disoriented in the best possible way once it was over. Each band was so distinctly, beautifully themselves, and immersing myself in that idea ignited my own hunger to make anything creative immediately. 

I had the chance to speak with Carolina and Elijah after the show, mentioning that I was writing this for A&M's student radio, where Carolina told me that she and Edgar actually used to be djs, an offhand detail that stuck with me, because it's cool to think she once did exactly what we do now. Elijah said “I love Texas, I love Buccees”, and I told him to come back and play more shows here. If they come back, I will absolutely see them again, and I encourage everyone else to as well.