“The poetry of earth is never dead,” wrote the remarkable English romantic John Keats, a truth felt deeply in the atmospheric soundscapes of she’s green. Tracing their artistic identity straight back to the natural world, the Minneapolis-based five-piece–vocalist Zofia Smith, guitarists Liam Armstrong and Raines Lucas, bassist Teddy Nordvold, and drummer Kevin Seebeck–craft shoegaze and dream-pop that feels like an organic extension of the earth itself.
In a digital age increasingly dominated by synthetic art and algorithmic instant gratification, she’s green offers something wonderfully human. Their music moves with the slow, deliberate grace of nature, a refusal to rush in a world that demands constant noise using lush guitar textures and soaring melodies to tether us back to the real world. Their sprawling new 26-minute EP, swallowtail, stands as proof of this patient craftsmanship–a rich, immersive environment designed to make you feel like you’re running through open fields or lying under an overcast sky.
Ahead of their performance at Reading and Leeds Festival and their debut UK headline tour, I spoke with Zofia, Liam, Raines, and Teddy (unfortunately Kevin couldn’t make it!) about swallowtail, finding new worlds within their music, their journey from DIY spaces to international stages, and what remains unexplored.
Alana Ash (CULT MACHINE): You’re leaving for Reading & Leeds soon, followed by your UK headline tour. How are you feeling about everything? Has the preparation been different this time around?
Liam Armstrong: Honestly, it’s kind of pretty similar to being in the UK before. I think it’s just the fact that we almost feel like we just came off another tour, which is kind of different. It’s just non-stop craziness.
Zofia Smith: I think it’s a little different just because we have a longer set, and we’re integrating a couple of new things into the set. We’re also going to be interacting with the crowd a little bit more because it’s our first big headline run. So we’ve been thinking about stuff like that, and how the stage is going to look, which has been pretty fun. But it’s very subtle.
A: Yeah, you’ve been on the road quite a bit this year already. I want to know what you guys have been listening to lately, either while travelling or getting ready to go back on tour, or anything that’s been inspiring you lately?
Raines Lucas: Honestly, I’ll give the left-field answer because we obviously listen to a lot of music. But when you’re playing shows every day and listening to live music for hours, I feel like a lot of us turn to podcasts, audiobooks and long-form YouTube videos in the car, which I think is an underrated way to keep your mind fresh during the day. I personally listen to a lot of public radio.
ZS: I’ve been listening to Wiser Than Me (podcast). In terms of music, I’ve been kind of inspired by what the younger people are doing, sort of in the hardcore scene. Arranged In April, Swapmeet..
LA: I’m listening to some Clay Birds. I knocked the dust off Heavy Metal by Cameron Winter.
AA: Oh, yes. That’s a classic! Well, I mean, I don’t know if I can say that it’s a classic already..
You guys also mentioned that you like to get out into nature during a tour, whether that’s national parks or waterfalls, to help you keep grounded and stay sane. And the UK has pretty incredible landscapes outside of the cities. For this time around on the tour, do you guys have any bucket-list places you want to go to?
LA: I think we just started kind of waiting on our itinerary. We’re not sure how long we’ll be in the car or where we’ll be.
RL: We didn’t see the ocean the last time we were there so I think it’d be really cool if we saw it this time around.
Teddy Nordvold: I remember technically seeing the ocean, but it was just a port in Newcastle.
AA: Okay, this is kind of a fun question, but if each member of the band had to be represented by something you’d find in nature, what would everyone be?
TN: Liam’s the tree. I know that.
LA: I was gonna switch it up and say frog or something.
RL: I think Kevin is a rock. A really big rock. I wanna be a fungus.
LA: I think Zof would be a wildflower.
TN: I’ll probably be an annoying bird.
RL: I wanna be a fungus.
LA: For Halloween we should all get costumes that represent us.
TN: We gotta think about that cause we’re doing a show on Halloween!
LA: One of us has to wear a corn in a cob costume.
More than halfway into 2026, this year has already been a wild ride for she’s green. Between festivals, international travel and their debut in China, the band has found themselves playing to audiences far beyond the Twin Cities. China, in particular, remains the highlight of the year.
“We got to connect with people across the world,” Zofia says, recalling crowds that left the band completely blown away. Fans lined up hours before doors opened, bringing an attentive energy that made the group feel special from the moment they stepped on stage.
Off stage, the trip was packed with equally memorable side quests. The band soaked in the experience by taking hikes through lush tea farms, soaring through the forest canopy on an epic multi-stage zipline, and simply wandering through vibrant city streets late into the night.
Yet, the ultimate crowd-pleasing moment came down to an unexpected secret weapon which was Raines’ secret language skills. Having attended an immersion school from the age of five, Raines casually revealed his Mandarin to the crowds, a party trick that apparently blew the roof off every venue. Starting that young might just be the ultimate cheat code for picking up a language, leaving me, someone who has miserably failed at Mandarin, thoroughly envious of that young-brain magic.
AA: On top of all of that, another big thing is swallowtail came out last month! Congratulations! Now that it’s had a little time to exist outside of the five of you, how does it feel to finally have that record out in the world?
ZS: I think we really did something different with it, and I put a lot of heart into it. So it feels like there was definitely this release for us. I personally felt really good to just get that out.
AA: ‘close your eyes’ had actually been around for quite a while before finding its way onto swallowtail. What made this feel like the right moment for that song to finally have a home?
TN: It finally felt done (laughs).
That song existed for a while and kept changing and getting longer. We kept tweaking small parts because there was this lingering notion of like, “It needs something else. Something has to change.”
And then, after I don’t even know how many revisions, we added this one new part and it finally fell into place. We were like, “I think this is a great closer.”
ZS: But I think there is something really beautiful about this project because, to me, it kind of takes you on a little roller coaster, but there are also so many more soft moments that I feel like we haven’t really tapped into before in our discography.
So it felt like we were unlocking a part of who we are as a band. Going forward, I feel like we’re so much more ready to create a larger body of work where we can go back into those chambers that we’ve created from past projects. Now we just have more to work with. We’ve also toured more, and I feel like we’re pretty locked in and ready to make an album!
AA: Oh my goodness! Is it finally happening?
TN: There’s still a lot of work to do, though.
AA: I feel like this EP is very immersive that I’d say it creates its own little environment around you.. Do you think about the record as a complete world while putting it together, rather than just seven individual songs?
RL: I think we definitely chose them based on, you know, like—some songs for chrysalis and swallowtail were written around the same time, but they felt like different things.
So there are maybe some songs on other projects where we were like, “Yeah, that doesn’t really blend with whatever this is.” Maybe we didn’t have the most cohesive idea ahead of time, but you definitely start to recognise when songs feel like they fit in the same world.
LA: Yeah, and then we definitely wanted swallowtail and chrysalis to kind of just remain in conversation with each other.
ZS: I kind of feel like chrysalis is also attached to the project. When we listen to the record, it just feels natural that it’s in the same physical format.
AA: I loved ‘dear ivy’ and the vulnerability of ‘empty house.’ After spending so much time with the EP, I want to know what your guys’ personal favourites are?
LA: I’ve really been loving ‘keeper‘ now. I think that’s one that we just kind of started playing live, but it’s always really fun and really groovy.
ZS: That one is so fun live, and it’s interesting because we wrote it–it seems like a while ago now–and we had a break where we weren’t playing it at all. But now that we’ve played it a good amount, I’m like, “Dang.” There’s this new energy that kind of comes back to the song. So I’m really excited for this tour. I get to play them.
Honestly, I really like ‘paper thin’ I think that one might be my favourite. close your eyes is pretty close to that one. I know the boys all really love ‘close your eyes’ so I want to go to my second favourite, which is ‘paper thin.’
AA: For this specific leg of the tour, which ones are you most excited to play live?
RL: I think there will hopefully be a euphoric feeling playing ‘close your eyes’ as a headlining band. Because we were playing it as an opener is kind of goofy.. But playing that song for people who’ve heard it will be really cool.
We’ve played it so many times over the past three years, but it’s never been released. So this will be kind of the first time we’re playing that song for people who’ve heard the recorded version.
AA: You worked with Sonny DiPerri. And this is also your first time recording a project in full at a studio. Was there a particular moment during that process where you heard a song differently from how you had originally imagined it?
ZS: Oh my gosh, yeah. And honestly, it freaked me out. We had a little bit of demo-itis, there were moments where we were like, “Okay, I just have to let that go.” It honestly felt like a different song some of the time, but you just have to release it.
Now I love it but it just took a second cause it was like Ah! It’s a different song.. It was kind of emotional having to hear something so different.
ZS: I think ‘locket’ changed the most. ‘empty house’ is really different too.
TN: Yeah, hearing the first rough takes of ‘empty house’ when we were all tracking it, and then realising we were taking it in a way more stripped-back, minimalist direction. Hearing the first steps of that and realising that this is going to sound way different than what we thought it was going to sound like, but it’s going to sound way more impactful as a result.
ZS: When we first tracked ‘close your eyes‘.. You walked in the studio and nothing was mixed at all, but it sounded like the clearest we’ve ever sounded.
It was just this moment of, “Oh my god, this is gonna be something completely different than what we’ve ever sounded like.” It sounded so beautiful, like “That’s what we sound like?”
RL: I’ll never forget listening back to that live recording for the first time. That was so cool.
AA: What was that first reaction like when you heard the full EP finished in full?
LA: I think we were just really shocked at how polished it sounded. I think we’d just never heard our own music like that.
TN: It was while we were still on the China trip. We stayed a little while longer because we wanted to explore some of this side of the world that we’d never been to. We were actually in Taiwan.
We were listening to some of the mixes just to write out mix notes and work on revisions, but that was the first time I’d listened to the full recordings of everything with all the overdubs added and with the first round of rough mixes. We were getting towards the end of making these notes of what we wanted changed in the mix.
I was sitting on a beach in Southern Taiwan–I think Kaohsiung is where we were. I listened to the whole thing start to finish on this park bench, just on the beach there, and I had this profound sense of, like–wow. This is an incredibly special thing that we got to make.
As a whole, it’s a really immersive and mind-bending thing to be like, “Wow, I remember when we wrote about this idea for the first time, and now we’ve seen it to this level of fruition.” It’s amazing.
ZS: Yeah, it felt very vulnerable. At first I was like, “Oh my god, they can hear every little bit of my vocal inflections.” So I was kind of scared, but I was also like, “This is crazy. I’m really proud of myself.”
Listening to swallowtail for the first time feels like stepping through a hidden door in the woods into a world of your own making. There’s an undeniable folklore running through She’s Green, a sweeping, cinematic quality that stretches beyond dream-pop and reaches into something closer to legend and myth.
The answer was an immediate yes. “Don’t get us started on Lord of the Rings,” they laughed.
Fantasy, for them, isn’t simply about escapism. They’re drawn to the way these stories repeat and reshape themselves, how a story about a person can begin as something completely different, even a weather phenomenon, and eventually become mythology.
I’ve always loved music that feels like it has a mythology of its own, and as someone who is very much a fantasy and mythology nerd myself, I love that she’s green seems genuinely interested in building a world around their music rather than simply making songs and leaving them there. At one point, they even joked about writing a long book to accompany their eventual LP, which immediately had me thinking about the merch possibilities. A she’s green fantasy concept album? I’m sold.
Naturally, this led us straight into the inevitable question: if they could spend a day inside any fictional world, where would they go? Beyond Middle-earth, Teddy confessed to being a huge Percy Jackson kid growing up. As someone sitting with a Poseidon poster right next to me, my inner Greek mythology fanatic couldn’t resist asking about their Camp Half-Blood cabins.
For a band so inspired by nature, it feels fitting that their imagination stretches just as far beyond the ordinary.
AA: Is there an element of the band’s sound that you think people might overlook because of the dream-pop and shoegaze comparisons that you get quite a lot?
LA: I guess the softer side. There might be a little bit of pressure to make harder, more rock kind of stuff, but I think we’re just going to continue doing all the things that we want to do.
ZS: There definitely are people who have been like, “I really like your heavier stuff..” and I’m like, “That’s okay. I’m not gonna cater towards you.”
AA: It’s your music!
TN: There’s one other thing I’ll add in regards to elements that most people might not necessarily pick up on or overlook…
Obviously, even though especially with this record we explore more minimalist and softer lanes, me and our Kevin, are both fans of heavier music too. We try to dust in a tiny little bit of seasoning from influences from the more metal world, or really heavy or doom kind of music.
One of our friends from the scene here in Minnesota, was like, “Yeah, I saw you guys talk about how you were listening to these really heavy records when you were making this album, and now I see what you mean with this song that you were talking about.”
And I’m like, “Yeah, we just dust in just a little bit!”
LA: Don’t sleep on the rhythm section!
AA: Do you guys ever feel like comparisons to bands, or these old bands and stuff, can put your music into a box?
LA: Yeah, I think comparison in general is sometimes not a great thing to do with art.
ZS: I think we are a little overlooked in that sense. They’ll hear it and be like, “Oh, this just sounds like this.”
But if you took out all the pedals and the distortion, I really truly think our songs are just really nice, good songs. If you just play them on acoustic, it would not be shoegaze and it would still be a good song.
People aren’t really realizing the instrumentation behind it and the core of the song.
LA: A lot of people focus on aesthetics rather than just enjoying music. They already have this picture in their head from what people are saying.
TN: That’s kind of a litmus test for us as well, just in songwriting. If you take all the effects and all the processing out, we want to make sure that just the core melody of everything we’re doing is enjoyable and can stand on its own without all the effects, etc.
AA: You guys have gone from DIY spaces to festivals, international shows and now, of course, your own headline dates. What’s something about the way the band operates that you’ve deliberately kept unchanged despite everything getting bigger?
LA: Doing what we think is right for us and not sacrificing the original vision that we had when we started the band, which was basically just to have fun with it and see what we could do.
I think that’s kind of the mission that we have for ourselves, and we’re gonna keep going with that.
ZS: Yeah, we’re very humble people, and I think we stand by that. None of us are getting big heads over anything. It just feels like we’re doing it with the people. We don’t have a sense of pop-star mentality.
We’ve always just kind of approached every show like a small show, and I think we’re gonna stick to that as much as we can.
TN: Also, just in the day-to-day of the way that we’ve been doing things, especially on the road so far, there have only been a few times where we’ve had other people besides the band members along with us on the road or even at shows.
We’re kind of still operating in the grand scheme of things where, on tour, we’re doing everything. It’s just us five, and we’re driving ourselves everywhere. We’re our own crew for load-in and load-out, we’re our own merch crew, and we’re our own TMs.
Just because we’ve been used to doing it that way since we started. That’s just kind of how we started doing things, and I feel like we’ve gotten pretty well-versed in what that’s like with us five on the road. We’ve gotten a good sense of best practices for doing that.
I’m not saying that’s better or worse than any other way to be on the road as a touring band, but coming from that background of doing it yourselves with all your homies kind of set us up so we can just go on the road and do this ourselves. That’s kind of what we’ve been doing so far.
It’s definitely a lot of work, but we’ve gotten pretty good at it.
AA: As you said Liam, you guys seem to do everything pretty intentionally about letting the band develop at its own pace. For example, rather than rushing towards the debut album.. what do you guys think taking that time has allowed you to do creatively?
LA: Definitely go on a lot of tours, but also just kind of get more experience. I think that’s what we need because we kind of started a few years ago, and Zof and I had never been in bands before.
So I think it’s just getting enough experience to where we feel like we’re ready to actually put out something that we’re super proud of. I think we’re really proud of everything that we have out, but I think the album just deserves that much experience.
ZS: Touring takes you to all these places that are really inspiring places. So I think having experienced all of that and then going into writing is going to feel more special.
AA: If you guys could show the She’s Green of 2022 one moment from where you are now, what do you think would completely blow their minds?
LA: Anything in China or even the UK. I mean, in 2022, playing in Chicago was the coolest thing we could possibly do.
TN: Maybe show 2022 us a photo of Slide Away. I remember when we booked that first show, like, on that little weekend run. We played that tiny little bar in Chicago, and that already felt completely insane.
And then playing the biggest venue I’ve ever been to in Chicago, only a few years after with literal legends that we look up to as well..
AA: Now you’re moving on to bigger and bigger and bigger stages!
After swallowtail, the festivals and everything happening around the band right now, what do you think still feels unexplored for the band?
ZS: Liam and I were working on music before, and we were kind of just tapping into different genres and stuff. Liam recently was revisiting some of the old material that he’d created, and it kind of was this moment of, “Well, we could incorporate these other genre ideas into what we’re working on.”
I think that would be really awesome and something we’ve never really done.
TN: Yeah, there’s stuff in the vault that I remember we were experimenting with after we wrote and released the wisteria EP that still lingers in the back of my head.
close your eyes was the same way, where we had written an early version and it just kept sticking around, like, “There’s something there. We’ve got to keep exploring it.”
There are other tracks like that, or other ideas, or even just motifs that I’m thinking I really want to put some effort towards diving further into and exploring more thoroughly.
LA: I also think just headlining shows in general are kind of unexplored areas for us. We’ve played a few, but we’ve never had a tour like the ones we’re gonna be doing this fall.
AA: When someone discovers she’s green through swallowtail for the first time, what do you guys hope stays with them after the last song ends?
LA: I think we just want to make music that gives people hope and also allows them to reflect and just be more grateful in their general life.
But yeah, anything that they need, I hope it can just kind of give them the will to continue.
ZS: Life’s hard and I wanted to make the lyrics a little bit open-ended, so they’re not just so specific and so exactly what Liam’s saying.. I would hope that people would just take what they need from it.
Or if anything, even if they’re just lightly listening to it and they’re not deep-diving into everything, but it just makes them more relaxed and they have a better day, and they’re just in a more calm headspace.
LA: And inspire them to create.
TN: Going back to what you said about it being a bit of a world-building thing, I just love music that really feels like it transports you or puts you in this kind of environment.
So if people walk away from swallowtail feeling like they’ve experienced a new setting or a new world, or they got a sense of environment from it, like it kind of took them to a place, that’s something that I really hope our music gives people–a safe place.
Through every lush guitar texture and wide-eyed lyric, She’s Green proves that the truest art isn’t manufactured by algorithms but is grown, nurtured, and shared by real human souls. They remind us that whether we are searching for hope, fleeing the plastic noise of everyday life, or simply needing a gentle sanctuary to reflect, music can still carry us somewhere deeply real.
Their music doesn’t ask you to arrive anywhere in particular, only giving you somewhere to wander, reflect, breathe, or to disappear into for a little while. As they move from DIY rooms to international stages and toward the long-awaited possibility of a debut album, there’s still an entire world left for them to discover–and the world they are building is one you’ll want to get lost in.
Catch She’s Green live on their upcoming UK tour, listen to their sprawling new EP swallowtail, and step into a world entirely of your own making.
