The Linda Lindas Write as a Collective on Third Album ‘GOTTA GET OUT’

The Linda Lindas spent their early years being described in terms of their age. That framing is harder to sustain now. On their third album, ‘GOTTA GET OUT’, the Los Angeles quartet — Lucia de la Garza and Bela Salazar on guitar, Eloise Wong on bass, Mila de la Garza on drums — wrote collectively for the first time.

The shift matters more than it sounds. Lucia de la Garza has said that writing alone left her unsure whether a song belonged with the band, whether it was “Linda Lindas sounding enough.” Working as a group removed that test: if the four of them wrote it, it is a Linda Lindas song. The result is a wider record, built on synths and funk touches and on years of touring rather than on novelty.

Eloise Wong describes the method plainly: they trust each other’s instincts, so an unfamiliar idea gets tried. Lucia is careful to say the band is not rebelling. The impulse is curiosity, not contrarianism — a distinction worth making for a group whose 2021 breakout, ‘Racist, Sexist Boy’, arrived with a reputation for confrontation already attached.

There is confrontation here anyway. ‘Blood On Our Hands’ carries the album’s most direct political statement, and Lucia traces the writing to anger, sadness and loneliness — a response to what she calls a messed up system. The band’s conclusion is not despair. Her position is that it matters not to lose hope and not to look away.