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Every day around 4 p.m., The Linda Lindas put down their instruments and jumped in the pool. They used these aquatic moments as a reset during a week-long writing retreat in Palm Springs where phones were banned, the outside world was suspended, and four young people who’ve been making music since tweenhood were writing together in the same room for the first time.
In the process, they figured out who they really are.
GOTTA GET OUT, the third album from Bela Salazar, Eloise Wong, and Lucia and Mila de la Garza, is the sound of a band discovering itself. Historically, The Linda Lindas have written individually and brought songs to the table. It was a process that served them well through their impressive, Ramones-esque debut Growing Up (2022) and its forceful follow-up No Obligation (2024). The two records took them from L.A. Chinatown all-ages scene mainstays to tours with Green Day and song placements in Inside Out 2. But for this one, they wanted something a little different.
“For the first time, we were presenting ideas to each other that weren’t fully formed. That was scary. But we worked through everything together and figured out the role each of us naturally plays,” Lucia explains. “Writing together was a way to find our collective sound,” adds Eloise. “Anything can work if we’re all shaping it together. We can write this slow indie song or a funky dance-y song. And it can all be for the band because we all worked on it together.”
At the house with the pool, “I haven’t finished this, but do you wanna hear what I have?” became credo. Bela would conjure a “vibe” — a Logic loop, a guitar part twisted through pedals, a chord progression that was unmistakably hers — and they’d construct a song from there, working out lyrics in real time. They tinkered with synths for the first time, and graduated beyond bar chords. At a second retreat in Long Beach, a Mission Impossible marathon was the background ambiance as they worked out yet more songs — by the end, they had 30 total. “We discovered a lot about being very intentional,” says Lucia, who had recently graduated high school.
“Gotta Get Out” was the very first song they wrote. They didn’t intend to make it the title or the theme, but kept coming back to it, rewriting verses right before tracking vocals, clipboard and pen in hand, until, as Lucia says, “we made it mean something.” Opening the LP with big spicy synths and an ominous groove, it captures a central restlessness: the itchiness of being inside while the world moves — the desire to break out of the old habits, the old sounds, the old you.
The album’s visual world, designed by Eloise, makes the same argument through imagery: inspired by an old Audubon guidebook, clouds grow across the singles’ art from fair-weather cumulus to full cumulonimbus, viewed from a windowsill. The lyrics are rubber-stamped, the paper is glued, and every smudge is maintained.
