The Linda Lindas growing up from viral moment, headlining sold-out Pittsburgh show

When The Linda Lindas played in Pittsburgh in September as part of Green Day’s show at PNC Park, drummer Mila de la Garza sported a T-shirt covered with Campbell’s Soup cans. It didn’t come from the nearby Andy Warhol Museum though.

“The venue was right next to the museum, too,” her sister Lucia de la Garza said. “We tried to go, but then we had to do soundcheck.”

“Yeah, we only had time to go to the gift shop,” Mila chimed in before both laughed.

The Linda Lindas, who went viral in May 2021 with their performance video of “Racist, Sexist Boy” at the Los Angeles Public Library, will be back on April 19 for a headlining show at Spirit Hall in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood.

The band — 14-year-old drummer Mila, 18-year-old guitarist Lucia, 17-year-old bassist Eloise Wong and 20-year-old guitarist Bela Salazar, with all four sharing vocal duties — will have more time than their brief set at PNC Park, where they blazed through seven songs in 20 minutes.

“We put it all out there,” Lucia said with a laugh. “We were like, we have 20 minutes. We can go all out for 20 minutes.”

“… We could try out all these fun, weird moves,” Bela said, “and it didn’t really matter.”

In their brief career, they’ve opened for Paramore, played Coachella and the National Spelling Bee and appeared on “Yo Gabba Gabbaland!” After their debut album “Growing Up” in 2022, they released their sophomore album, “No Obligation,” on Oct. 11, 2024, bringing appearances on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and “The Daily Show.” The album features a mix of spirited pop-punk and energetic new wave with standout tracks like “All in My Head” and “Don’t Think.”

In a Zoom chat on March 30 on a day off in Las Vegas, the four bandmates, frequently finishing each other’s sentences, discussed their headlining tour, missing school, their new album, cover songs and more:

How is this tour going so far?

Lucia: It’s really fun. We’ve been looking forward to this for for a while now because we don’t do a lot of headlining shows. We’ve had a lot of exciting experiences and a lot of fun being an opening act for a few years, but it’s really rewarding, having these new headlining experiences. It’s really cool seeing people that know our music and just seeing all these years of work that we’ve kind of done. It’s been really really fun.

It seems like it would be a much different experience than playing the big stadium shows where people might not know you and you only get 20 minutes. Is this a little bit more gratifying?

Lucia: For sure. It’s different in a lot of ways, just the size of the venue. It’s funny because last year on the Green Day tour, we were last to soundcheck and first to play, so our work day was super short and condensed. And now we’re the ones that are sound-checking first and playing last and it’s just such a different thing that is very exciting.

Bela: I’d say it’s hard to tell for us, at least for me, how big our band really is, like just the size of it because we don’t really play headline shows and now it’s like whoa! We’re selling out these places. I didn’t know we could sell out some of these places, and it’s like it just doesn’t make any sense, but very grateful.

Well, Pittsburgh is sold out…

Lucia: Yes! (Mila and Lucia pump fists) That’ll be fun.

With this tour, are you seeing a lot of yourself in the audience, like a similar age group to you?

Lucia: More on this tour than ever and I think that’s partially because of…

Mila: It’s because of Green Day.

Lucia: Because of Green Day and because of Paramore.

Mila: We usually have a lot of little kids, like 10 and under and parents, but not usually as much teens, like our age.

Lucia: But there’s more on this tour than ever.

Mila: So that’s been cool for us.

Lucia: And a lot of them are Green Day fans or Paramore fans, and that’s why they know us, and that’s actually really a cool connection.

How is this tour working school-wise? It’s a month-long tour, so does that mean there’s a lot of makeup assignments to do?

Lucia: Yeah, there’s a lot of catching up.

Mila: A lot of online and doing tests when we get back.

Lucia: But we’re used to it now.

The school is good with working with you?

Mila: Yeah.

Lucia: Yeah. They’re used to it. We’re used to it. We missed seven weeks at the beginning of the school year last semester because of the Green Day tour.

Mila: This is very short compared to that. (laughs) It’s like two weeks and then we’re back for two weeks and then we’re gone for two weeks.

Lucia: We only miss three weeks of school though because one of them is spring break.

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Does going back to school when the tour is over, does that help keep you grounded a little bit?

Lucia: Yeah, for sure. It’s nice having that other mindset to go to sometimes and friends outside of the band, so we don’t get too sick of each other. (laughs)

With the new album, “No Obligation,” what were you shooting for sound wise?

For our first album, “Growing Up,” we kind of put it out almost straight out of the pandemic. Just after this viral moment that we had, we were like, OK, we want to put an album out. What are some songs we have? We recorded them, we put it out. That was kind of the process for that one. And it was a little bit rushed but also really cool because it’s just this culmination of our work, I guess. But then with that, we toured on that album a lot. And we got this sense of what we want out of our studio albums a little more. After touring, we got more of a sense of our live sound and of our process. So going into the writing for the second album was really interesting because we had a lot more intention with it. We knew we wanted to showcase how we’d grown since that first album and how we want to showcase more of our live sounds too a little bit. And we wanted to have more collaboration between the four of us, just because the first album was very independently written just because of the pandemic and stuff.

Did it feel like a big leap forward?

Eloise: Well, I mean, the first album was all of the first songs we’d ever written. And this album, we had more of an idea of what we wanted our songs to sound like and how to make them sound like that.

Did you go in with these are the sounds, the influences, that we want to incorporate more?

Eloise: Oh, not really. I think we’d just written more songs by then, like we had more experience writing. It wasn’t just all the first songs we’d written thrown into an album.

Where do you find the inspiration, the material, the subjects of these songs?

Eloise: I don’t know. I don’t think we had a theme or a set idea of what we wanted to write about. They just kind of happened how they did.

Bela: Life. (everybody laughs)

Lucia: They are kind of a reflection of what we see, what’s happening, I guess.

Mila: Our experiences.

Lucia: It varies, I guess. It happens to be more personal sometimes, sometimes it’s more impersonal. … It’s almost like an observation of ourselves and what’s around us, I guess.

The “Don’t Think” video just came out and that was directed by Kiki Banta and Marlowe Taylor. Did you find working with people closer to your age helpful?

Lucia: Yeah, it was really cool.

Mila: I don’t know if I would describe it as “helpful” per se, but it was definitely very fun and kind of refreshing.

Lucia: We don’t really get to do that super often, which will change as we get older, I guess, but it definitely made it super interesting and cool to see their vision come to life as well as ours and what their process was. They were just super cool.

Eloise: I guess it was different from other videos that we’ve done because, most of the other videos we’ve done, we storyboarded first and then we went to the people who were shooting the video and told them, ‘Hey, this is what we want.’ But this one, Kiki and Marlowe, they had a vision, and they were like, ‘Hey, what do you think of these ideas?’ And we’re like, ‘Oh, this cool.’ I think it was fun.

With going viral so early in the life of the band, how do you shrug off or defy any expectations that may have been placed on you by other people?

Bela: I feel like we are just starting to get to that point where we don’t really talk about that. I feel like for a long time, that was the narrative all the time. But I feel like with this album, at least for me personally, I felt like it was the first time that it was like, we wrote these songs, and we just wrote these songs. It has nothing to do with that again, the viral moment. … I think the Green Day tour helped too, because there are all these new people that we were exposed to, and they don’t necessarily know about the stuff from before.

Mila: They don’t know us as that.

Bela: So that was really refreshing.

Eloise: Yeah, because, obviously, the library video is cool and it’s something we did, but it’s not all of who we are. I think a lot of people who have followed us since then kind of have that idea of like, ‘Oh this is who The Linda Lindas are.’ But we’ve grown since then and we’re continuously changing.

Does it feel like the band is just getting started, like this is just the beginning?

Lucia: Yeah, we have a lot of growth and exciting things that we still want to do and it’s a lot of fun.

I wanted to ask about the songs that you’ve been covering. I know you’re doing (Bikini Kill’s) “Rebel Girl,” (Green Day’s) “When I Come Around” and (Talking Heads’) “Found A Job,” so what do you see in those songs and what appeals to you about them?

Lucia: We just want to do something that gets the crowd moving, I guess. (laughs)

Mila: Yeah, they’re fun. There’s some songs that we like that the crowd will sing along to.

Bela: It’s just fun to learn new things just in general because sometimes we’re playing our songs a lot, and it’s just fun to see how you learn so much. I feel like I’ve learned so much by learning these covers just because I see how other people do things, and it’s really refreshing.

Eloise: Yeah, and we started out as a cover band, so it’s fun to keep playing covers. Also with the Green Day cover, a lot of people in the crowd for this tour, they discovered us through the Green Day tour, so that’s kind of cool to be able to play that for them.

Lucia: And also for the Green Day cover, we go into a Jawbreaker cover at the end of it. And it’s kind of this little circle thing because…

Eloise: Because the bass is very similar in those two songs. But the first out-of-town shows that we did were with Jawbreaker. So it was kind of cool, first tour, and the last tour we were on.

You also got to play “Big Mouth” with The Muffs. Is that nerve racking, is that daunting to play the actual song with the actual band?

Lucia: Yes. (laughs) Oh my god, that was so scary, but also really fun. They’re really nice.

Mila: Yeah, they are the best.

Lucia: It was really sweet. It was a really cool moment. I would say even more scary was when we played the Talking Heads song in front of the Talking Heads though. That was even more terrifying.

Mila: That was because, with the Muffs, they were playing it with us, so that was scary but…

Lucia: We’ve also played that song for a lot longer so we know it better, but the Talking Heads one was like, oh, we started learning it like a week ago. And we’re like, oh shoot, now we got to play in front of you.