she’s green + witches exist + smush @ Bar le Ritz▪

The guitars are the first thing you notice. she’s green have a big, layered guitar sound, the kind that can get lost in a larger room, and at Bar le Ritz PDB it did the opposite. It filled the place, enveloping in the best way, with Zofia Smith’s voice sitting on top of it rather than fighting through it. The sound in the room was as good as I have heard there.

This was the Minneapolis band’s second Montreal visit of 2026. In May they opened for Chapterhouse at Fairmount Theatre, a set I reviewed at the time with the complaint that it was over too soon, and spoke to the band before that show. Five months later they were back on their first North American headline tour, behind swallowtail, the seven-track EP released on 10 July through Photo Finish Records, with smush and Witches Exist on the bill.

The room was strangely quiet when I arrived, but it had filled by the time the openers started and stayed busy all night. smush, from Brooklyn, brought a different edge to the evening. Their songs move between dream pop and grungier guitar sounds, with stretches of fuzz giving way to sweeter melodies, and their debut album if you were here i’d be home now has already drawn attention in DIY circles. Witches Exist, from Austin, lean more toward indie rock, with synth textures alongside the guitars and Jackson Baker’s vocals shifting to suit each track. It was a different sound from the shoegaze of the other two bands, and a useful contrast.

she’s green are one of the most exciting new bands I have come across in the last couple of years, and what struck me most on this visit was how much tighter they are. They have toured hard through 2026, across North America and into the UK and Europe, and it shows. Smith’s vocals sit against the guitars of Liam Armstrong and Raines Lucas, with Teddy Nordvold on bass and Kevin Seebeck on drums, and the five of them now sound like a band that has played these songs a hundred times without wearing them out.

The setlist and the pacing were, for me, perfect. They opened with locket, keeper and purple, then moved through paper thin into empty house, the song that pares swallowtail back to acoustic guitar and voice and gives the set its quietest moment before smile again and graze built it back up. The back half ran through willow, bleed and figurines before a closing run of mettle, mandy and close your eyes, with no encore. Thirteen songs, newer material from the EP sitting comfortably next to the older singles, and nothing that felt like filler.

Technically swallowtail is an EP, but at 27 minutes it is tantalizingly close to being an album, and when a full-length does arrive I expect this band to shine even brighter. Bar le Ritz was the right room for this tour, intimate and nicely busy, though I suspect that by this time next year they will be playing somewhere considerably larger.

At the end of the set, Smith came over to where I was shooting and asked if I could take a photo of the band with the crowd behind them. I felt like a rabbit in the headlights for a moment, and the lighting was far from ideal, but the picture came out well. Afterwards the band stayed out in the room, signing albums and talking with the people who had come to see them.