The Linda Lindas
Between lessons, lectures and extracurricular activities, young people everywhere lose themselves in daydreams of stardom, imagining crowds roaring as they score a buzzer-beater or fans cheering as they shred a wicked solo. Few experience the realization of these fantasies as acutely as Los Angeles rockers The Linda Lindas. Before even graduating high school, they opened for Green Day and Paramore, worked on a movie with Amy Poehler and garnered praise from the likes of Kathleen Hanna, Rage Against the Machine and Sonic Youth.
After a public performance of their breakout hit “Racist, Sexist Boy” went viral in 2021, the quartet of Bela Salazar, Eloise Wong and sisters Lucia and Mila de la Garza signed to Epitaph Records and released their debut album Growing Up. Released in October, their second album No Obligation exhibits an exponential growth in the group’s musical chemistry. While the lyrics often directly reflect the experience of being a young person, it’s not hard for anyone to find themselves in songs like “Once Upon a Time,” which is about strategies for navigating conflict, or even the groovy Spanish-language track “Yo Me Estreso” that features “Weird Al” Yankovic’s accordion licks. With riffs and runs that harken to classic punk and riot grrrl records and an electric attitude, The Linda Lindas prove they are not to be underestimated. They’ve grown up since Growing Up, and they aren’t afraid to show it.
“We were a lot more intentional with what we were doing,” says Lucia on a call that includes the whole band ahead of their April 15 show at The Basement East. “We really wanted to show people — after doing a lot of touring on Growing Up, we had gotten a lot more experience and kind of gotten a better idea about what we wanted out of our second album. And because our first album kind of came out straight out of the pandemic … the writing process was super isolated, and we knew that we wanted to have a lot more collaborative writing on the second album. We knew that we wanted to have a lot more intention with our live sound on the second album.”
Wong chimes in, noting that her contributions to Growing Up are some of the first songs she’s ever written.
“With No Obligation, I had a better idea of how I wanted my songs to sound,” Wong says, “and how I wanted to sound on them — and how I envisioned them.”
“We like to take advantage of the difference in our voices,” adds Salazar, “and also the quantity of voices that we have.”
No one deserves the pressure of being called “the voice of a generation,” but The Linda Lindas certainly provide a valuable perspective into the mind of Gen Z. They are funny, friendly and fiercely impassioned about important causes like racism and sexism. And if you disagree, you can get lost.
“I feel like on a personal level, we’re not, you know, speaking for our generation,” Lucia says, “but I do think that we are kind of naturally all living in this time [when] we feel it’s very important to be truthful and speak up about things that matter to us.”
Though they might address prescient fears and relatable frustrations, the group doesn’t just do it to make a statement. They do it for themselves.
“I think music provides an outlet to express a lot of those things,” says Wong. “It’s nice to be able to, like, yell onstage and just get everything out.”
In a time when so much pressure comes from social media and internet culture to perform and present your life in the most digestible way, The Linda Lindas aren’t folding. Like the rockers before them, they are making a mess — a beautiful, fun mess. And like their idols, they are paving the way for the next generation of punk. They have no obligation to be role models or muses, but they are inspiring their multigenerational fan base anyway.
“Sometimes I see little kids in the front row, and we’ll start playing, and they look shocked — or like, in awe or scared,” says Mila. “It’s awesome to watch.”
“It’s really special, especially seeing kids that are really into loud music,” adds her sister Lucia. “The ones that are brave enough to dance around or be loud too.”
