In the studio with The Linda Lindas: “We’ve grown exponentially since our first record”

Youthful Los Angeles punks The Linda Lindas have been quietly busy in the studio over the past year. What they’ve made is actually very loud. We caught up with the whole band to get the first look at their eagerly-awaited second album, No Obligation…

Lucia de la Garza (vocals/guitar): “We wrote this album over the course of a year. We really had fun with it, and we’re excited that we get to show off how we’ve grown as musicians, as people and as writers. We had more time to think about it, because we would know when the recording dates were coming up. We would play the songs during practice leading up to those dates, and we would figure out exactly what we wanted to do with a song and what everyone in the band would do.”

Eloise Wong (vocals/bass): “We got to play together a lot and figure out how to interact with each other while playing music. We recorded the album by live tracking, so we were all in a room together and playing at the same time, instead of on [2022 debut] Growing Up, where we laid our things down separately.”
Bela Salazar (vocals/guitar): “It sounds more like us, in a way, just because that’s how we play live. I think that felt very genuine to who we are.”

Lucia: “The whole album has more mature feelings on it. We definitely explored a lot of different sounds that we were excited about, a lot of different emotions that we were feeling. You can tell Growing Up is our first record, but we feel like we’ve grown so rapidly since we made it. It feels like we’ve grown exponentially since that time because of all the experiences we’ve had.”

Eloise: “I think No Obligation feels a lot more thought-out than Growing Up, because [back then] we were like, ‘Oh, we went viral. We should have an album.’ We just threw whatever on it. I think it’s nice to have some songs that we actually spent time on.”
Mila de la Garza (vocals/drums): “We all have very different music tastes and the way we write songs kind of reflects that, but it’s like a nice collage. I love how it really flows from top to bottom.”

Bela: “I was listening to different types of regional music from Mexico – the type of music my grandpa would have me listen to when I’d go over to his house. I listened to a lot of rock, so I was trying to mix that together. I kind of wanted to mix Linda Lindas with the [other] stuff that I listen to.”
Eloise: “[The song] Cartographers is [a bit different]. I feel like the other songs that I sing on this record I’m just yelling but on this one I’m actually trying to sing. I feel like it sounds a little awkward, but it’s turned out pretty cool!”

The Linda Lindas will release No Obligation on October 11 via Epitaph. This article originally appeared in the autumn 2024 issue of the magazine.

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