“Gotta Get Out” is The Linda Lindas’ third album, and immediately, you hear a far bigger leap from than there was from their first album. From the ballads, to the surf guitar, to the golden-ticket guest performance (rhymes with Shmayley Shmilliams), to the Eloise Wong-penned hardcore beatdowns, and all the way to the more nuanced lyrics where the personal purrs against the political… everything has stepped up for the LA quartet.
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 Salazar, the oldest, was barely a teen when The Linda Lindas formed, but turns 22 next month. The youngest member, Mila De la Garza, 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. 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 – a Warner imprint, one of the Big Three – which could potentially raise the eyebrows of punk and DIY scenesters.
“We are always so grateful for the people there and the support there, which still stands now, and we feel it,” guitarist Lucia De la Garza says of Epitaph. The band wrote the record without a deal and 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.”
DIY ethics informed the album’s art direction, as well. 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 people who make art in their bedrooms.
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 on 2Gotta Get Out”. And while some of the OG pop-punk-indebted songs here do maybe have a bit less of a bite, the label certainly didn’t meddle, tamper, or parachute in Jack Antonoff… or whatever.
The Linda Lindas’ roll call of famous friends is almost buries the lede. It is so well documented that it sometimes threatens to eclipse their actual work. 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, alongside Karen O. 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 Wong 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!”
The Fat Angel Sings 