Nectarine Girl’s name stems from a two-week hyperfixation on her namesake fruit, which gradually grew to represent the sensitive girl she is on the inside. If she had to change her name to her current obsession, though, she says it would be Orchids. “I’m excited about the challenge,” she says, the smile evident in her voice. “I love keeping plants, so I’m excited to have so many orchids in my house.”
She recommends to me the perfect starting plant (pothos, she says, can be found in any supermarket), and details more about the extensive house plant collection she grows as a jungle in her house. “I have this anthurium plant that I’m tracking that’s flowering in the middle of January,” she shares excitedly, despite my ignorance as to what an anthurium even is. “If I ever feel down about myself, genuinely, I’m like, ‘Okay, well, I have an anthurium plant that’s flowering in the dead of winter in January in New York.’”
Much like her beloved plants, Nectarine Girl seems to bloom most prettily after a challenging winter, as, after all, challenges are what most of her new album, Good Excuses for Laziness, is derived from. The name for the album itself indirectly comes from a particularly rough patch in Nectarine Girl’s life.
“I was having some sort of conversation with somebody about [me] not doing well,” she recounts. “I was having a really hard time. 2023 was a really tough year… Really big life-disrupting things just kept happening back-to-back-to-back-to-back… But I was talking to somebody about like, ‘Damn, I’m just in such a bad place. And I feel like every time I try to get up and get back to work or do something, I get knocked back down.’ Then the idea [came] of like, ‘Well, this is a good excuse for laziness, because it’s kind of how I feel.’”
For Nectarine Girl, who is now signed to Elton Audio Records, perhaps the most discouraging thing is being unproductive. “It feels like laziness to take rest, or to not be working on the thing, or to not be working towards my goals, my dreams, my whatever,” she continues. “Not working feels so wrong to me. But then, having something really difficult happen to you where you have to pause your life is a good excuse for laziness, where it’s acknowledging both the shame and the discontentment with not working, but also understanding that I’m only human and there’s only so much that I can do in this situation that’s been dealt to me.”
Good Excuses for Laziness, as a project, is disingenuous to its name. It is anything but lazy. By combining celestial interludes with grungy alt-pop bangers and soul-crushing ballads, Nectarine Girl curates an album that takes its listener through the seven stages of grief in the most enjoyable way possible. Good Excuses for Laziness starts with a portal-like introduction to the realm of Nectarine Girl, “i’ve disappeared,” that is really just the real first track of the album, “beauty is blinding,” slowed down by 800% and produced by Thea Minster (“Have you ever seen the video of Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’ slowed down to 800%?” Nectarine Girl asks when explaining part of where the concept came from, the other part being a song from the popular indie game Undertale. “It’s just a crazy, beautiful, ambient track.”). From there, the album decelerates as the layers are peeled back, exposing a raw and achy center that showcases Nectarine Girl’s knack for relatable vulnerability.
“I feel like it’s hard to start off an album with like, ‘Okay, let’s be super depressed,’” she joked. “It made sense to me to start with the more pop stuff, the catchier things, the things that are easier to listen to. And then as you go through the album, if people stick around, then I can afford to be more vulnerable, which is like in any situation, how you get to know somebody. You start with the small talk, the easier things to talk about, maybe some humor, things that are lighter. Then, as you get to know a person, you get to know them more deeply and more seriously, and they’re more vulnerable. You might find out about some darker things that they’ve been through.”
And with the album’s songs already garnering tens of thousands of streams, the proof of a positive reception is evident.
“It’s been good,” Nectarine Girl says of the album’s immediate response. “I have my loyal regular commenters [on social media], people who kind of are always commenting on my stuff, just saying that they liked it, asking some questions about it, and just overall people saying that they’re really, really moved by it. So that’s been really good.”
Truthfully, though, Nectarine Girl attempts not to get swept up by the reaction to new music releases so soon. “Honestly, the week that something comes out, I almost try to bury my head in the sand a little bit. I don’t do it on purpose, but I spend so long working on something that when it comes out, it’s like, oh my God,” she admits with a mock sigh of relief. “I try to boss up, get over it, try to see [the response], and just take things for what they are and be grateful that anybody’s listening to me at all.”
She continues, “After a few days, I’m like, ‘Okay, it’s time to respond and get in touch with the reception of this thing.’ But I give myself a day to just be like, ‘Okay, it’s out,’ and I can just exist and have it be out.”
Lyrics, though, are not Nectarine Girl’s only means of expressing herself, as Good Excuses for Laziness boasts three purely instrumental tracks. “I’m really a big fan of instrumental stuff,” she says. “I’m a producer first or just a music instrumental lover first, and then lyrics, et cetera. So I love having instrumentals on any project that I do.”
Good Excuses for Laziness’s tenth track is exactly that, an almost-three-minute-long piano piece that could easily serve a place on La La Land’s soundtrack. With a hauntingly wistful melody painted with musical accidentals, “today” quickly made its way onto my own classical music playlist despite its home on a florist grunge album.
“I had written that song (‘today’) on the piano,” Nectarine Girl says of the interlude. “When I was writing the song, I was in such a dark place, but it ended up being something that was so pretty that I would listen back to and it would give me so much nostalgia. I remember showing it to my girlfriend, Thea… and she was like, ‘Oh my God, you have to put that in the album.’ And so I did. When I was recording it in her bedroom, there were crickets outside. It was nighttime. It was so beautiful. So that song to me is supposed to feel like living inside of, or having the moment where you know what you’re experiencing is going to be one of the best memories of your life.”
As we ended our conversation on the plants that scale her walls, I found that Nectarine Girl may have been unknowingly talking about herself, and how she wholeheartedly shares a tangible piece of herself in every song that she writes. Despite the struggles she’s been through, she thrives. “The thing with plants,” she said, still encouraging me to take up horticulture, “is you can take one potted plant, and you can separate it into 1,000 plants, and then you have 1,000 different plants. The way to not feel so bad about it if you kill something is that I’m sure that there’s a part of it that’s still alive somewhere else, in a lot of cases. And for the amount of fear that you have for killing something that’s alive in your house, there is the same amount, if not double the joy, of having something that’s alive in your house that’s thriving once you learn how to take care of it.”
Photos courtesy of Elton Audio Records, featured image taken by Maya Lazar | Interviewed on January 22, 2026
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