In conversation with She’s Green

She’s Green seemed to create a world of their own inside The Canopy at Reading Festival.

The Minneapolis shoegaze band’s dreamy but heavy sound filled the tent, moving between soft, hazy passages and walls of crunchy guitar. Their layered vocals and distortion surrounded the crowd, making their set feel less like something to simply listen to and more like somewhere to disappear into for a while.

For a band that began by recording music together in a basement in Minnesota, playing Reading Festival is a surreal step up. But when asked whether they ever imagined they would one day be performing at a major festival in the UK, Liam’s answer is immediate.

“Never.”

The rest of the band laughs at the idea. Sofia explains that, when they started, they had “such little expectations”. They were simply having a good time and wanted to play shows in their neighbourhood.

“It would be really funny if one of us was like, ‘We’re definitely going to be playing festivals abroad one day,’” Raines says. “That would be absurd, you know?”

For Kevin, international festivals were more of a dream than a destination.

“Definitely a dream, but not a goal.”

That lack of expectation seems to be part of what makes She’s Green’s rise feel so unexpected. Their music has grown alongside them, but the band still describes what they do with the same sense of playfulness that seems to have been there from the beginning.

They call it “moss music”.

For Liam, the term reflects the resilience of moss and its ability to represent “smaller worlds and ecosystems”. Sofia sees another side to it: something soft, fuzzy and almost comforting, contrasted with the distortion and fuzz that frequently erupt through their songs.

It is a fitting description for the sound they brought to Reading. Their music can feel delicate one moment and enormous the next, with quiet passages giving way to heavier guitar sections. In the packed Canopy, those contrasts became even more pronounced.

But as the band’s audience has grown, so has the seriousness with which they approach the music. Their latest EP marked their first time working in a professional studio with producer Sonny DiPerri, a very different experience from tracking themselves with friends.

“We had to be extra serious,” Liam says. Working with DiPerri pushed them to arrive more prepared than ever, spending more time tightening the songs before entering the studio.

Kevin describes it as the most intensive preparation they had done for a group of songs, while Teddy remembers being surprised by how comfortable the studio environment felt. Despite the pressure of working with an established producer, the process never felt rushed.

“He was able to get really good takes out of us really quickly and keep the process moving smoothly,” Teddy says. “It felt very natural.”

That balance – between preparation and spontaneity, softness and distortion, intimacy and scale – seems to run through She’s Green’s music.

And perhaps that is also what they hope people find when they see them live.

For Liam, the most important thing is simply that people get whatever they need from the experience, whether that’s discovering “a cool band”, processing something, or just having a good time.

Sofia has something more emotional in mind.

“The biggest thing I want people to feel is just comfort,” she says, “and just knowing that you’re not alone in this world.”

For a band that spent its early days making music in a Minnesota basement, She’s Green may have travelled further than they ever expected. But standing in a packed tent at Reading Festival, surrounded by the hazy guitars and voices that make up their own little universe, their original goal seems to have remained surprisingly simple: making music that brings people together.

“I want them to feel really good and seen and heard,” Sofia says.

It’s a long way from that basement in Minnesota, but She’s Green are still holding onto the same thing that brought them together in the first place: making music they enjoy and sharing it with other people.

Photos by Wiktoria Wolny