The Linda Lindas have stormed the gates

One of the opening bands, Berzerk, spotted the Linda Lindas bassist in the crowd and yoinked her onstage to sing a Bikini Kill cover. “I love being a fan. My favourite thing is being in a crowd,” Eloise says – but as the universe seems to repeatedly remind her, she’s destined to hold court on both sides of the barrier. What she’s got to say is too important to stay in the pit. 

Bela Salazar tells me that she isn’t very technically minded when it comes to writing music: “I don’t know what notes are right.” But that’s her ripping Guitar Solo Of The Year So Far at the end of the Spanish-sung “Helado De Limon”, its spiky, trebly lacerations right out of the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. “That’s a horrible guitar solo. It’s totally BS,” she starts before conceding: “It’s really fun to play.” She smiles shyly as her bandmates salvo praise her way. It rips! That’s all that matters! 

“What I love about Bela’s guitar playing is that you can really feel every note,” Eloise says. “And it really shows in that solo. Bela’s humble.” That comment having loosened her shoulders, Bela offers, “I’m all over the place with my music taste, but I was really into The Edge for a second, and there are some weird parts in all of these songs – I don’t even know where they came from.” 

Lucia de la Garza feels most like herself in the fleeting few minutes directly after a Linda Lindas show, on the return journey to the green room and its oasis of carrot sticks. “There’s a period of time before you have to talk to people about it, but you’re just very happy and kind of tired, and kind of have a lot of energy, and kind of need to take a shower…”

You get the sense that she enjoys being in her head, holding a feeling for as long as possible, never itching for what’s next and facing it with grace when it arrives. She hand wrote all her lyrics for this record, which tracks with that theory, even if that was partially due to the band’s self-imposed no-phones-in-the-writing-room rule. “I wanted to write on paper, and that was cool because I had just graduated high school and I thought that I would probably never write on paper again,” Lucia says. “And then two weeks later, we went to Palm Springs to write. All of a sudden, writing on paper again!”

Mila de la Garza wrote the closing song on the band’s new album. It’s aptly titled “See You Next Time”, a rain-on-the-windows ballad that walks you out the door with a sighing smile. Several of her friends have asked her, what the heck is this about? There’s an oblique reference to the weather in Georgia and mellow guitar chords borrowed from elevator music. It’s very love-song-coded, but also pleasantly ambiguous. “It can mean whatever you want it to mean,” she told them and tells me now, “so it doesn’t disappoint anyone.”

“Every song, we all touched in some way,” Bela says. 

“That was kind of our belief system in terms of concept for the album,” Lucia agrees. 

Back to Bela: “We were very intentional about everything, and we kept using the word ‘elevate’, but we just wanted more and to do more and try everything.”

The album in question is GOTTA GET OUT, the LA band’s third. Immediately, you hear a bigger leap from #2 to #3 than there was from #1 to #2: from the ballads to the surf guitar to the golden-ticket guest performance (rhymes with Shmayley Shmilliams) to the Eloise-penned hardcore beatdowns, which we’ll get into later, all the way to the more nuanced lyrics – the personal purring against the political. The Linda Lindas don’t write bratty-kid punk anthems. They never did, really. But these songs are weightier and further from that designation than ever. 

Part of this might be explained by the band members hitting consequential ages, when everything starts barreling by and it’s only later that you can make sense of it. Bela, the oldest, was barely a teen when The Linda Lindas formed, but turns 22 next month. The youngest member, Mila, just had her sixteenth. 

Some of the band’s feet-first evolution might also be chalked up to their departure from the iconic punk label Epitaph, founded by Bad Religion’s Brett Gurewitz and home to some of their favourite bands (or really everyone’s favourite bands). The Hollywood-based independent institution was a logical fit for their first two full lengths: Growing Up (2022) and No Obligation (2024). But Gotta Get Out is being released through Reprise – an imprint of Warner Music Group, one of the Big Three – potentially raising the eyebrows of punk and DIY scenesters. From Jawbreaker’s untimely end to Good Charlotte’s recent bad behaviour, historically, when Big Business marries with punk, it hasn’t gone great – yet the band has nothing but good things to say about both operations. 

“We are always so grateful for the people there and the support there, which still stands now, and we feel it,” Lucia says of Epitaph. They wrote the record without a deal, in between contracts. “We knew that we wanted to make an album, and that’s kind of all we knew at that point. Once we had written and recorded a lot of music that we were very proud of, in the end, it was like, this is it. This is the album we’ve made that we’re most proud of, and we’re just gonna try to push it and see how far it can go. It felt like everybody at Warner was really on our team and really responded to the music as well.”

Even with sound intentions of getting their anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-fascist mandate in front of more people than ever, I expected to hear some airbrushing. And while the more OG pop-punk songs here do have less of a bite – take the bouncy, sun-kissed lead single “Burning Out”, a natural choice to reacquaint everyone with The Linda Lindas – the label didn’t meddle or parachute in Jack Antonoff or whatever. 

The four worked again with Carlos de la Garza, father to drummer Mila and guitarist Lucia, behind the boards, as they have from the beginning. One day in the car on the way to the writing room the acclaimed producer asked them, how do you wanna track the album this time? The answer, of course, was live! That’s what they did with No Obligation, a shift in process from the lockdown-era debut. 

No – contrary to suspicions, Gotta Get Out actually gets heavier, goes more out-in-the-storm, despite its big-biz backing. The fact that “Blood On Our Hands” not only exists but was greenlit for a single alone proves that The Linda Lindas aren’t making any concessions. Sharing more commonalities with Hatebreed than Best Coast, the lumbering, doomy track features Eloise bellowing from the gut about the everyman’s complicity in the US war machine: “Death on our hands, death on our money / Real lives at stake, it’s just a business they’re running.” The low, wrecking-ball guitars sound like they’ve been tuned by Satan himself, Eloise indulging in her heavy-music influences while purging some angst about the current state of the union.

“Playing music like that to a crowd, and everyone responds to it, it validates you and what you’re feeling,” she says, “because sometimes it can feel super isolating, and it can feel like you’re the only one who sees whatever’s going on.”

At the same time, there’s Mila’s “See You Next Time” as a counterweight. “I Could Be Wrong”, which has a new-wavey glow akin to The Cars and Blondie, is similarly introspective and could-be-about-love. The pogoing posi-pep-talk “Okay” would fit in on one of Rancid’s more mainstream records, or one of Green Day’s less mainstream ones. And the garage-surf of “Helado De Limon” resembles a turbocharged La Luz as Bela sings in Spanish about licking her wounds, licking that titular lemon ice cream, and then pressing on to write her own story. 

Each track could be the jumping off point for a wildly different playlist. The album doesn’t hold your hand throughout its sequence or unfold seamlessly. That was never the goal. The band are happy to jerk you from left to right, as though they’re taking turns steering the joyride and you’re in the back, nails burrowed into the seat.  

Indeed, Gotta Get Out is the play-it-as-it-lays product of four friends hungrily discovering music and exploring what they can make together. With songwriting as with interviews, they always work as a four, tossing hot potatoes back and forth in playful but considerate repartee. (For example, they put their heads together and reel off many of the global cities that have a branch of Nando’s – Bela’s favourite UK food spot – which sadly doesn’t include their native LA. We also spend 20% of the interview discussing which vegetables are superior (see: cooked spinach). There’s no interrupting or poo-pooing, only Yes-And-ing.)

Between “Burning Out” and “Blood On Our Hands”, there was another single, “Closer”. It features one of their collective heroes. Hayley Williams flew in from Nashville for two days. One of the days, Eloise explains, the troupe went to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios. “They have scary mazes, and she would always be at the front of the crew, you know, going through the maze, because we were all hiding behind her. I didn’t see half of those mazes because my face was buried in someone’s back.” It’s a neat parallel – almost too on the nose – with Williams’ role as a trailblazer for women-led pop punk and emo music over the last 20 years.

Lucia takes over to explain that the other day comprised four hours of gossiping and one hour of brass-tacks work-work. “She helped us write too. We proposed the idea [of the song] to her with an empty bridge, and we were like, we don’t know what to do with this section yet. It was a group effort, and that was really awesome – to see her process. The part that she’s singing, the chorus, was already written by us, so it was cool both to sing a part written with her and see her sing a part written by us.”

“The second she started singing, we all looked at each other like…” Eloise says, making a face akin to ten exclamation marks. You can’t really give notes to THE Hayley Williams, I offer – did she nail it first time? (Yes.) “Also, we were in her songwriting territory, so if anything, she would have corrected us,” Mila says. 

Lucia admits they were essentially ripping off All We Know is Falling, after all, Paramore’s hugely underrated 2005 debut. “People are gonna like this,” she remembers thinking, “that she’s doing emo music, dipping her toe into it.” The song traces a mid-aughts formula that’s familiar but still stirring and satisfying. In the verse: crunch guitar as tight as a baby’s fist. In the soaring half-time chorus: backing vocals that are alternately ghostly-reverbed and angrily hurled from the back of the room, while between them Williams’ voice casts heavenward. It might sound like a Paramore song featuring The Linda Lindas rather than the other way around, but increasingly the band’s MO is to be masterful chameleons and collaborators, so that’s no diss. 

At this point, The Linda Lindas’ roll call of famous friends is almost too well documented that it sometimes threatens to eclipse their actual work, burying the lede. It’s the only thing more widely documented than how they first came onto people’s radars: a viral pandemic moment of them sneering through a white-knuckle microsong called “Racist Sexist Boy” in the incongruous setting of the LA Public Library. The video seemingly landed on the for-you pages of people like Thurston Moore and Tom Morello, who quickly began spreading the world. The latter has since invited them to play his activism all-dayer, Power to the People, alongside Springsteen, Joan Baez, and other outspoken anti-fascist musicians. 

But The Linda Lindas had been a band for three years at that point and already mixed in circles with riot grrrl foremother Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, who’d seen them at LA’s women-curated festival Gxrlschool. Karen O was there too. After the library performance, the release of their 2022 debut, and their performance in Amy Poehler’s Moxie film, they would go on to add a stadium tour with Green Day and Smashing Pumpkins to their CV. (“Billy Corgan rode by on a golf cart. He waved at us,” Eloise remembers.) They’ve played with almost every other indie rock and punk-adjacent legend you can think of since then: Rancid, Paramore, Blondie, The Breeders. They even got Weird Al playing accordion on a track from their last album. And just this month the new Green Day film, Nimrods, gives them a shout out. It happened to The Linda Lindas; it could happen to us! They have become shorthand for punk youth storming the gates. 

All of that said, Eloise is never more animated than when she’s talking about local bands and her backyard DIY scene, “especially smaller places. There’s this place called Bad Dog Compound over here, which is basically a garage. I saw Special Forces from San Luis Obispo there recently, and that was super fun. Once I saw this band called A Place We’ve Always Been there, and it’s like a tiny room, but everyone is giving all of their energy to singing the lyrics and dancing and just having fun with each other. I saw this band called Wife, and they were really good. The energy of their music was just amazing. They were mathy and chaotic like All, and then they had the groove of, like, Soulside, and it just made me so happy.” 

If one of her bandmates didn’t stop her, she’d roll right on, and I wouldn’t mind. She has that unbeatable combo of passion, talent, and encyclopaedic retention – truly doing the job she was made for. “I think there’s nothing like live music, and being one with a crowd like that,” she continues. “It really gives you hope. That’s what inspires me – seeing other people play.”

DIY ethics informed the album’s art direction, too. Eloise handmade everything, cutting the single and album visuals out of craft paper and walking into Warner to present her work. It’s a delightful image: this multibillion-dollar conglomerate moving to the whims of young women who make art in their bedrooms. As it should be. Some of Eloise’s work is currently being exhibited at a gallery called Junior High, in Glendale. She tells me how they wanted the art for each single to tell a story with rising action. 

“So the first single was ‘Burning Out’ and there are smaller fair-weather clouds on it. Then it’s ‘Closer’ and the clouds build up a little bit. And then ‘Blood On Our Hands’, you can see a big cumulus congestus in the back. And then on the last one, there’s a big cumulonimbus. It’s going to be a gatefold. You open it up and it’s raining.”

Rain can be synonymous with something foreboding, with bad luck, trapping you out in the storm, but it can also be a saving grace – after a prolonged drought, say. The band’s raging against the machine – a post-democratic US, a world where genocide is normalised – is never black and white, and never enacted without hope, optimism, and love. Nor do they let such unsolvable horrors bury the meaning in everyday life, all of its micro-anxieties and micro-joys, mess and miracles. The album treats it all equally: the only approach that makes sense. 

“We have felt very inspired at a time when routine and habits are easy to fall into,” Lucia tells me. She’s not only referring to the difficult-third-album adage but also how, when all you know is falling, the future seems impossible, and many people turn to routines, easy distractions. Everyone’s gotta get out; for The Linda Lindas, the way out was art. “It was necessary to be inspired and try new things and reinvent and feel hope and all the joy in all those things – making art – in order not to feel crushed every day,” Lucia says. 

It’s only 8 am in Los Angeles. After I leave, The Linda Lindas are going to kick some songs around the practice room. Then they’re headed to the beach. From there, who knows? The clouds might roll in, the rain might fall, but I have a feeling they’ll know what to do.