For The Linda Lindas, one of the biggest perks of being rock stars is pretty simple: no homework. “This is the first tour that none of us have had homework on the road,” drummer Mila de la Garza tells Her Campus in an exclusive interview with the band. “I just feel so free.”
For nearly a decade, the four-piece punk band — made up of Bela Salazar, Eloise Wong, and sisters Mila and Lucia de la Garza — has been balancing school assignments with soundchecks, homework with headlining shows, and textbooks with tour dates. You know, typical teenage stuff.
Aside from performing at sold-out shows and touring around the world (Playing all these shows has made Mila’s fingers “buff,” she says), the Linda Lindas are your typical teenagers: they reference Gilmore Girls, play pranks on each other, and explore new cities when they aren’t goofing off on the tour bus. And, like many teenagers, they have an inherent drive to make noise — and make their voices heard.
The group originally formed in 2018, when the members were roughly between 8 and 14 years old, and played their first show at Girlschool LA — a music and ideas festival founded to celebrate and amplify women-identified and gender-expanded artists. After that, in 2019, the group got the attention of Bikini Kill’s lead singer, Kathleen Hanna, who asked the Linda Lindas to open for them at their show at the Hollywood Palladium.
Their performance then caught the attention of comedy legend Amy Poehler, who asked them to record songs and appear in her Netflix film Moxie. Mila was only 8 years old at the time: “I wanted to read [the book it was based on], but Lucia wouldn’t let me because I was too young, or whatever.” She read it anyway. “I was sneaky and rebellious.”
The film premiered in 2021, but Lucia says that the film’s “very important messages about women speaking out” are especially relevant today. “We’re all going to do whatever we can to keep the conversation going and not forget that there’s a lot of injustice — to put it broadly — happening,” she says. “That’s the most important thing to do.”
For The Linda Lindas, speaking out has been at the heart of their music — and they express it in the spirit of pure punk rock. Their songs “Racist, Sexist Boy” and “Blood On Our Hands” touch on current issues like toxic masculinity, bullying, war, and wealth disparity, while other tracks like “Burning Out” and “Closer” (which was a collaboration with legendary Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams) draw inspiration from the members’ personal lives dealing with mental health, fame, and growing up. “Everything that we write about is about something that’s just happening in our own lives, and a lot of the time does happen to be anger,” Lucia says. “It’s all very personal.”
We’re all going through different things, but at the same time, we’re kind of all in this together right now.
Despite racking up millions of streams and wearing their emotions on their sleeves for almost 10 years, the band says sharing these personal experiences isn’t any easier: “It’s scary,” says Lucia, “We’re on this tour where we’re experiencing all these feelings [that we wrote about] again, live.” However, there’s a silver lining. “We have a lot of songs about feeling stuck or lonely or like you can’t escape your own mind, and being at a concert is the opposite of that,” she says. “It’s cool how the negative [experiences] kind of turn into these really joyful moments.”
And when you go to a Linda Lindas show, you experience that joy firsthand… even if there’s moshing and head-banging involved. Along with their 38-show tour across the U.S. and Canada, The Linda Lindas played a show at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Oct. 1 — headlining alongside Mack Kean and WHATMORE — for UO Live, which was organized by Urban Outfitters and Levi’s as part of UO’s All Together Now campaign. The band says that playing for a crowd of predominantly Gen Zers and college students had a different energy as opposed to performing for an older crowd. “The older people and the younger people, they’re both very excited to be at the show,” Salazar says, “But I feel like the younger people, sometimes, are [more expressive with their] excitement.”
That excitement is more than just someone hearing their favorite song, though. For many fans, particularly those in the Gen Z zeitgeist, that excitement is tied to feeling seen and heard through music, and connecting with others who feel the same way. “We’re all going through different things, but at the same time, we’re kind of all in this together right now. We’re all kind of experiencing the same world, in a way,” Lucia says. “People our age are probably having similar thoughts and feelings to us about what is happening [in the world], and we’re all going to process it somewhat similarly, so it’s been cool to see people similar to us in age in the audience.”
As the group continues on tour, and as their fanbase continues to grow, that connection is fueled by The Linda Lindas’s tenacity to be heard, which Bela describes as the “punk ethos” that lives at the center of their music. “[We do] things because they’re the right thing to do, or because they’re right for us,” she continues. “Not just succumbing to peer pressure, or what we’re ‘supposed’ to do.” Because, when it comes to being rock stars, it’s not about the streams: “[It’s] doing the right thing.”
And now, with no homework waiting for them back on the tour bus, they’re focused on what’s next, whether it be hopefully attending their dream events — “Any of the Fashion Weeks,” Bela says, “We don’t discriminate.” — or continuing to make music that matters. And, with that, having the freedom to take it all on. “We’ve expanded in so many ways already,” Lucia says. “So, I’m like, ‘What else can we do?’”