July 20, 2025

Her New Knife is a four-piece shoegaze band originally meeting in Tallahassee, Florida during college and later officially formed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The band consists of Edgar Atencio on guitar and vocals, Elijah Ford on drums, Carolina Schooley on bass, and Ben Kachler on guitar. Many of their projects have either been self-released or in collaboration with Julia’s War, founded by Douglas Dulgarian of TAGABOW. In my opinion, Her New Knife is one of the most important reflections of what modern shoegaze is today.

*This interview was conducted over FaceTime during their Summer 2025 tour supporting Spirit of the Beehive. Some parts have been adjusted for clarity.

C: Did you guys just finish driving somewhere? Or…

Edgar: Yeah, we just left San Francisco.  We're, like, at some random town, like, slightly north of Sacramento right now.

C: Gas station shopping list?

Elijah: Yeah, I just shoplifted this dope-ass shirt that says trucker's Prayer, and it just has this, like, insane, like, so much riding on the back of the shirt. Like, it's just like a pit. Or like ones that are like, I'm the mama bear, like, blah, blah, blah.  I think those are awesome. But other than that, we get Redbull a lot of fruit, and breakfast burritos.  We get those a lot. Pretty normal shit.

C: What are some of your favorite road trip songs you go through?  

Edgar: We were just listening to hella Breaking Benjamin. It was badass.

C: What’s that about?

Unknown: You don’t know Breaking Benjamin?

Elijah: They're on some just like alt rock from like the 2010s. I don't know, very like, makes us want to become like mercenaries. They be on some Tom Clancy shit.  

Edgar: It's kind of like it's kind of like if an alt band, kind of just sounded like the Halo soundtrack.

Elijah: Yeah. You gotta peep Breaking Benjamin. They're like Three Days Grace if they were way better. Have you ever played any of the old, like, WWE games? Yeah, it's kind of like that.

C: My cousins used to, like, bully me on Halo when I was a kid, and like, we'd always like do 1v1’s and he'd like, fuck my shit up.

Elijah: You'd be crying or what, when he beat your ass?

C: Dude! He’d fucking kill me and then he'd be like, “Check yourself before you wreck yourself.” I’d get so fucking pissed, bro. But, yeah.

Elijah: It's a formative experience.  We've all been through it.

C: I know, the trauma. Do you guys have a favorite place that you guys have crashed while on tour?

Elijah: Yeah. We just got back from the dude Max's. Max and Sam, they're brothers, and they have this house on the beach in San Francisco, and they just have the Dope pad.  Like, it was just very nice in there.

Edgar: They had two living rooms.

Elijah: Yeah, and they were really nice people, and they have a cool, like, Max is in this band called Sour Widows, which we played with for the last couple days. He's also the drummer for Duster, and then him and his brother have a band called Rogue and they're like a black metal band.  And they're just both really nice people. Yeah, they're just the homies. Max works at a bakery-like coffee shop, and we went there the past couple days and he hooked us up. He’s kind of like the mayor of his little neighborhood.

Carolina: Like, everywhere we go, like every time we walk in, people will be like, “Hey!”

Elijah: We went to the grocery store and they gave us a discount because they knew Max. And he was like, “They're with me.”

C: He's got the connects, bro.

Elijah: Yeah, he's the goat.

C: Do you guys have any highlights you look forward to when you tour for long stretches?

Edgar: Well, typically, we get really excited to see, like, like national parks and then, like, like natural landmarks and stuff. When we did our first tour, our first big tour in, like, November, we got this yearly National Parks pass and we always just try to like stop and go and see some shit in nature or something like that. That's definitely the most exciting part is I think a lot of us haven't really traveled too much of the country, like, before we kind of toured and started driving all around. So it's exciting to just go and see some big ass waterfall and climb it or something like that.

C: I heard that you guys lived in Florida and then moved out of Florida; How do you feel your relationships with other bands, and your own music, changed as a result of that?

Elijah: I don't know. Not too much. I think living in like a city like Philly, obviously you see more shows and you're getting exposed to more… I don't want to say, like cutting edge stuff, but, like people that are like, on some crazy shit. Like, you see some really dope bands.

Edgar: It's just more diverse.

Elijah: Yeah, you don't really get that opportunity in Florida. There's definitely really good bands in Florida, but it's, you know, not as much as the Northeast. So I think we were just exposed to more when we moved up here, and we had some connections with TAGABOW and like Full Body 2 before we moved up.  Like we were just fans of them and just kind of like, hit them up asking “What's good in Philly? We're thinking about moving up there.” And, yeah, that was really helpful.

C: Do you guys ever feel some type of way touring with bands that you’ve followed or been fans of for a long time?

Edgar: Yeah, I mean, it's really exciting. For example, when we went on tour with Julie, TAGABOW, and Frost Children. You know, we’ve been listening to Julie since, like, fucking, I don't know, like 2020, 2021. And we, like, really loved TAGABOW, before we moved.  But, I don't know. At the point we went on tour we had already been friends with TAGABOW and we already met Julie, so being on tour and already liking their music it didn’t feel super weird because we were friends already and we’d just do stupid shit all the time. It was cool to see them play every night. But, definitely the whole mystique of “Oh, famous artist, cool person,” goes away when you know somebody personally and you realize they have just as much money as you do, (laughs) you know?  Like, it's just chill. It was just normal.

Elijah: Yeah, I think there's definitely a switch when you're an audience member and you're watching a band and you're kind of, like separated from them and you're like, “Wow, this is awesome,”  And you kind of like, look to them a little bit more, but then, like, when we started touring and playing with bands that we listened to, it's like, you quickly realize that you're kind of like peers. It's a different relationship. We’re not really ones to, kind of fangirl over, like, bands. Like, Spirit of the Beehive, we've always toured with them since high school and stuff.  And it's really cool to tour with them.

Ben: You fangirled over Dillon…

Elijah: Yeah, I fangirled over Dillon (of Julie).  I think he's the best rock star in the world.

C: He's hot.

Elijah:  He's hot, yeah.

Edgar: And then you find out he's addicted to door dashing.

C: That's sweet.

Edgar:  Yeah, no, we're all just friends, and it's cool and normal too.

C: I noticed that you have designs on your guitar, could you tell me more about that?

Edgar: Are you talking about the silver guitar? Yeah, so I had this classic Squire jag and I bought it a couple years ago and it was sunburst, and I hated the sunburst, so I painted it this grayish, like, bluish color, and then I painted the pick guard glittery and pink. But it was still kind of just like a piece of shit guitar.  And then Doug from TAGABOW, he had started modding his guitars and buying really high quality parts and, like, he just called me one day and he was like, “Hey, your guitar is a piece of shit. Let me fix it for you.” So I brought it, and he put on new pickups and all this stuff, and then he did just this, like, crazy work on it.  The photos of, like, the mannequins are from this, photo book that a friend of his made. He's an artist and a photographer. I couldn't tell you his name, but the body he just, like, I just told him, like, kind of like the colors that I liked: muted, silver, stuff like that.  And he just put paint or— he put like tape all over it and spray painted it, silver and scratched these like things on it by hand. Yeah, he just kind of, I didn't really give him a lot of instruction and I was just like, yeah, like, just make it this color and go crazy, you know?

C: Dang.  Okay. That's pretty cool. It really stuck out to me.  

Edgar: Yeah, no, I really love that guitar. I've always loved it, but it's definitely a much higher quality instrument now.

C: Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but I read that you guys all were related to a college radio station in Florida.

Edgar: Yeah, there was a radio station at FSU called the 89 and Carolina and I were DJs. That's how we met, through that and other mutual friends. But yeah, we worked at that radio station. We didn't all meet through college, but Elijah and I met just at the beginning of college and I’ve known Ben since high school. But the radio station definitely introduced all of us to kind of just like everybody we ended up becoming friends with in Tallahassee. So that was cool. Yeah.  There was also, like, I definitely learned a lot about music and different kinds of music from working there.

C: Oh, really? Do you think any of that translated into how you guys approach music now?  

Edgar: I mean, honestly, like, one time I was working, I was doing a shift. It was really late at night, and I pulled this random CD out, and it was Arto Lindsay's The Prize. And I played a track on the air and it was crazy to me.  And I binge-listened to all of his music and he was like the guitarist of the No Wave band DNA and his solo project was just like.. just really cool. He was just like, he grew up in Brazil. He was a guitar player.  But he didn't really know how to play guitar. So it was just kind of he just played in this like, really fucked up way and sang like Portuguese. But honestly, he inspired me a lot, and I feel like a lot of the vibe of the way I like to play guitar and like to write songs is really inspired by the way I feel listening to his music.  Not so much to like the way it actually sounds, just that there's just like a certain way about it that I appreciate. So, yeah, I definitely found a lot of stuff that I liked working at the radio station and it's stuff I still appreciate and listen to today. It definitely developed my tastes and the way I approach writing, for sure.

C: What parts of music do you feel drive you guys towards the heavier bits of your songs?

Ben: We like metal. And loud guitars, and heavy riffs. So I think that has to do a lot with it.

Edgar: Yeah, we don't really listen to a ton of shoegaze anyways. We've always liked heavier music.

C: And then my last question. Okay. Okay, it's a weird one, but um… I searched through all these interviews, and then I saw there was one where Ben talked about running a slime ASMR page on TikTok. I wanted to ask everybody is like, do you guys, is there still hope for that to pick up in the future or…?

Ben: There's hope for everything. It's just a million dollar idea I had and didn't fully commit on. But I think I have some free time coming up. So it might take off.

Edgar: We're kind of working on some other kind of brainswarming, some other shit right now, so it'll be a while before we get back on that.

Elijah: It’s on the back burner right now.

Ben: Whatever makes the most money in the moment, we're working on that and TikTok just wasn't bringing in the bills.

Elijah: It wasn't.  And that's the same thing that’s kind of happening with music now, so I think we are going in a new direction.

Edgar: We're gonna get really into tech.

Elijah: Yeah, we're kind of trying to get into tech, pitching some ideas.  If you know any engineers, you should let us know.

C: Wait, actually, I might know one.

Ben: We have great ideas.

Carolina: We were inspired by all the Waymos we saw in San Francisco.

Edgar: Do you think they could construct a vape with, like, raw material?

Ben: For cheap, for really cheap.

C: Like Geek Bar 2.0? Or what?

Ben: Yeah we can’t really uh…

Edgar: We can’t talk about that.

Elijah: We can’t really explain it all…

Ben: Sorry, our tour manager said we can't really speak more on that.

C: All right. All right. Well, cool. Thank you guys so much for your time. Thank you guys, I've been nervous about this the whole week. I felt like such a poser when you guys talked about Breaking Benjamin earlier.

Edgar: Bro, you need to hop on breaking Benjamin.

Elijah: Dude, yeah.

C: 'Cause I– Dude, I misheard you, and I thought you talked about, like, Breaking Bad or some shit, and I was like..  

Elijah: We liked that too.

C: I need to get into that one…

Elijah: You haven’t seen Breaking Bad either?

C: I've seen some.. Actually, I like, for the longest time when I was watching the first episode, and I kept falling asleep and people kept forcing me to watch.

Edgar: It's all that TikTok.

C: Ah!! No, no…

Elijah: Yeah, you need to get off the phone.

C: (Pause) Yeah, I got to get off that damn phone. Lock in on some real media. You right. All right, guys. Well, thank you guys so much again. Yeah, of course. Thank you.

Elijah: Oh, check this out. Fuck this up. Yeah, Matt earlier, hooked us up with hella bread.  We have so much bread in the car.

C: Was that from the bakery?

Elijah: Oh, yeah.  Shout out Day Moon Day Moon in San Francisco. Day Moon is the best bakery cafe in San Francisco.

C: Oh, fuck.  You guys are making me hungry. I gotta go. Thank you. Thank you, guys again. Yeah. All right, bye bye.