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Punk Rock’s New Hope: The Ferocious, Joyful Linda Lindas

Fueled by punk conviction (and snacks), this all-girl, school-age band is ready to release its debut album, “Growing Up,” nearly a year after its song “Racist, Sexist Boy” went viral.

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From left: Bela Salazar, Lucia de la Garza, Eloise Wong and Mila de la Garza of the Linda Lindas, a Los Angeles band of teens (and a tween) about to release its debut album.Credit...Krista Schlueter for The New York Times

PIONEERTOWN, Calif. — “Kids to the front!” the drummer shouted.

It was 10 p.m. on a Friday night in February and the Linda Lindas, an all-girl, school-age act from Los Angeles, was playing its first out-of-town show. The musician who beckoned the youngest in the crowd closer to the stage was 11-year-old Mila de la Garza; her bandmates are 14, 15 and 17. In pigtails and power-clashing plaids, they may be the country’s most exciting teen punk band, a galvanizing combination of wholesome and fierce.

Following Mila’s proclamation — a callback to “girls to the front,” a maxim of the riot grrrl movement in the 1990s that helped flip the power dynamic at shows — a handful of middle school and younger kids popped up amid the adults at Pappy & Harriet’s, a dive-y club in the desert here, 16 miles from Joshua Tree National Park. The space was packed, and eager; the sentiment onstage was jubilation, and the crowd caught on. “I feel very fancy,” Lucia de la Garza, Mila’s 15-year-old sister and a guitarist, vocalist and ringleader for the group, said, as she introduced “the first song I ever wrote.”

Channeling the Muffs, the Go-Go’s and the muscular bravado of ’70s punk, especially in the snarling voice of bassist Eloise Wong, the Linda Lindas shredded through songs about identity, friendship, power and cats, most from their forthcoming debut album, “Growing Up.” They windmilled their instruments in tandem, grinned at each other between numbers and tossed guitar picks to the crowd. “They are so cool — I was never that cool,” an objectively cool woman whispered to a companion. Mid-set, Bela Salazar, the 17-year-old guitarist, instructed the audience to do a primal scream. At the end, the foursome thanked their parents.

Nearly a year after they broke out with a viral video of “Racist, Sexist Boy,” an original song they performed at a Los Angeles public library, the Linda Lindas are, to their own shock, quickly ascending rock’s new feminist front. The rarefied combination of their youth, their gender, their heritage — they are Los Angeles natives of Chinese, Mexican and Salvadoran descent — and the ferocity and empathy of their music has made them a beacon, not just for young fans but for established artists.

“They’re incredibly talented and adorable and have wonderful things to say,” said Bethany Cosentino of Best Coast, who befriended them early on. “They made me feel hopeful. They have an energy that maybe the world will be a better place.”

The Linda Lindas may be, in the best punk tradition, still learning their instruments, but devotedly so. And with family roots in the Los Angeles punk and alt-culture scene (they were dancing at afternoon shows at Amoeba Records as toddlers), their vibe is genuine, and incandescent.

For the girls themselves, the band has given them license to experiment stylistically (their cat-eye eyeliner is a full-bodied kitty) and allowed them to process the tumult of the last two years. Much of “Growing Up” was written in Covid isolation, each girl making demos behind her bedroom door, addressing themes like missing friends and reliving mistakes. “A lot of these things, I probably should’ve been thinking about more,” Eloise, 14, said. “The songs kind of helped me find a way.”

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From left: Bela, Eloise, Mila and Lucia outside of Pappy & Harriet’s, the venue in the California desert where they played their first out-of-town show.Credit...Krista Schlueter for The New York Times

Graduating to global, not just local, attention is something the Linda Lindas are still getting used to, but they’re grateful to know they’re resonating. “People just reach out and say, ‘Oh, you inspired me to pick up the guitar’ or, ‘You’ve inspired my kids,’” Lucia said. “There are so many people that have felt something from something that we’ve done, and have taken the time to message us, and some of them are funny, and some of them are like, ‘Oh, I think you should write a song about all your cats!’ And we already have.”

Karen O, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman, guested with the Linda Lindas at their very first performance, at an all-female festival in 2018, when they were a loosely assembled cover band. Even then, “there was no lack of passion and enthusiasm and unbridled expression,” she said in an interview. “The matching berets, the eye makeup — they just seemed really tight.” Four years to the day later, she caught one of their recent, more polished shows. She called it “life-affirming.”

As an Asian American herself, she said, the presence of the Linda Lindas “really speaks to me, because I feel like a lot of us grew up kind of reserved and in the shadow, not in the limelight making music, which is this kind of mainline into self-confidence,” she added. “It’s so inspiring, and so surprising, to see these young girls having that — it took me probably 21 years of stuffing down all these feelings, when it finally exploded in a cathartic way when I was onstage. I could’ve used that when I was 12.”

From their start as kids with a typical schedule of piano and dance classes who enjoyed putting on little shows for their families, the Linda Lindas had a charmed trajectory to the stage. The de la Garza sisters and Eloise are cousins; Bela is a lifelong friend, and their parents are all artists, writers or designers themselves. Lucia and Mila’s dad, Carlos de la Garza, is a Grammy-winning music producer and mix engineer; when his daughters were about 9 and 7, he bought them a guitar and a (tiny) drum kit. They sat unused, for a while, but the festival invitation was the spark — too much fun not to pursue.

“I think it was something that I never thought I could do,” Bela said, in a video made shortly after the band formed, when she was 14. “Finding out it was something I really enjoyed — it’s always constantly about music. It’s just in everything that I do now.”

Soon they were playing showcases that Eloise’s parents, Wendy Lau and Martin Wong, a founder of the influential Asian American culture magazine Giant Robot, helped organize as community benefits, with the girls rotating instruments. Bela had played drums and guitar, and already had an avant-garde performance streak, her mother, Karen Salazar, said. “She’s always been fearless,” her father, Joe Salazar, added.

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“I feel very fancy,” Lucia said onstage, as she introduced “the first song I ever wrote.”Credit...Krista Schlueter for The New York Times

Parents, musicians, collaborators: Everybody in the Linda Lindas’ orbit remarked on their seemingly natural swagger. They do not appear to get very nervous — even when they opened for the feminist punk icons Bikini Kill in 2019, they were more stoked than intimidated, their families said. “They honestly don’t need a pep talk at all,” said Cosentino, who has served as a mentoring “band mom,” teaching them vocal warm-ups before Bikini Kill.

They are still highly adolescent. Backstage at Pappy & Harriet’s before their show, the band members were arrayed in little lounging piles: Mila and Eloise entwined on a couch; Bela, stretched out between two chairs, dozing like the green room was study hall. Lucia groused that, even with the excuse of a touring rock band, she did not get out of school early enough that day to miss having to run a mile in P.E. class. Eloise had managed a math quiz. A buffet of Hot Cheetos and other munchies awaited. When asked about their preshow rituals, they named “snacks.”

But do not mistake their offstage chillness. These girls are resolute, and ambitious, in their intent as musicians. They had been rehearsing nearly daily for this show, and spent all summer recording “Growing Up,” due April 8 from Epitaph, the home of Bad Religion and Social Distortion. “The goal,” Lucia said, is “to make sure our music has a positive influence, and that we can keep bringing attention to what’s happening in the world.”

Their breakout, “Racist, Sexist Boy,” was written in response to an interaction Mila said she had just before Covid lockdowns began, when a classmate told her he’d been instructed to avoid Chinese people. “After I told him that I was Chinese,” Mila recounted, “he backed away from me.” Their performance, in a nearly empty branch of the Los Angeles library — they were excited about the gig because, Eloise explained, “we all love the library, and we always borrow books” — spawned a wave of adulation.

Over a sludgy bass line and vocals that alternate between jumpy melody and rage, Mila and Eloise, who co-wrote the song, deride this small-minded person: “You say mean stuff,” they sing, “and you turn away from/what you don’t want to hear.” But the song is also spiked with hope — the lyric “We rebuild what you destroy” has become a Linda Lindas tagline. Karen O called “Racist, Sexist Boy” “a perfect little punk song. It’s so raw, and so confrontational.”

But it almost did not exist. The original lyrics were different, calling out the offender as an “idiotic boy.” Explaining this to me, Eloise was visibly uneasy with that phrase. “I realized that the lyrics were ableist,” she said, “and I kind of wanted to change it.”

The misbehavior is “about actions,” Lucia chimed in. “It’s about what a person says and does,” not who he is.

“All the adults around us were like, no, the song is fine, you don’t have to change it,” Eloise continued. “But, um, we didn’t want to be the oppressors that we were, like, screaming about. So we changed it to ‘racist, sexist boy.’ And I think it’s better that way.”

“Yeah, it wouldn’t have made the same impact if it was ‘idiotic,’” Lucia concluded. Their sophisticated generational sensitivities made the better punk song.

As young artists, they have unusually solid scaffolding. Carlos de la Garza recorded and mixed the Linda Lindas’ music in his backyard studio, where he’d also worked with Hayley Williams and Best Coast. The sisters’ mom, Angelyn de la Garza, a children’s wear designer and boutique owner, functions as the band’s day-to-day manager. Bela’s parents also work in design; Karen, a clothing designer, initially helped style the band’s mostly thrifted looks. (Now, she said, they’re happily on their own.) Eloise’s mom, Wendy, an art director, oversaw the many illustrations they used in promo design and videos — Eloise made some of the most impressive, of the girls as cats with elaborate manes, as freehand paper cut outs. They became the cover for “Growing Up.”

Recording that album last summer was a family affair. On the August day I stopped by, they were tracking “Magic,” a poppy song about overcoming self-doubt. One line tripped them up: Should it be “what if magic was real” or “what if magic were real”? Martin, Eloise’s dad, was an editor; they messaged him for a writerly consult. “The Linda Lindas take their grammar very seriously,” Lucia, the track’s lead vocalist, said. (They went with the incorrect, but more rock ’n’ roll, “was.”) As the bandmates waited for their turn at the mic, they read library books, wrote tiny-lettered notes, played with gaffer’s tape, stepped out for a piano lesson and discussed school schedules (A.P. vs. Honors Bio). Angelyn provided snacks.

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When asked about their preshow rituals, the Linda Lindas named “snacks.”Credit...Krista Schlueter for The New York Times

At the controls, his platinum albums for Paramore tucked up on a high shelf, Carlos cheered on the kids — “You’re crushing it, dude!” — and offered good-natured producerly notes. “Can you make it a little less sweet-sounding?” he advised his teenage daughter on “Magic.” “Just 22 percent more extreme.”

In separate interviews, the de la Garza parents and children said one of the great benefits of the band was an increased connection between the girls and their father. “We’ve gotten to know him,” Lucia said. “And it’s been really fun getting to hang out with him. Hopefully, that doesn’t go away too quickly.”

But even family support didn’t erase parental worries about letting their children loose in the music business. “As a person who’s worked in the music industry my whole adult life, I would never advise anyone to get into the music industry, especially my own daughters,” Carlos said. The path for women, especially women of color, is fraught, he added.

Martin agreed: “It’s so scary.” All parents want to protect their kids. “But I guess the second inclination as a parent is not to stand in the way of your kids,” he continued. “Your fears are not their fears, and who they’re going to be is not who you think they’re going to be.”

One way that the Linda Lindas have avoided the pitfalls of young fame is that most of them are not, individually, on social media. But there is still a social cost to being in homeroom the morning after appearing on a late-night talk show. “I’ve basically had the same class since second grade,” said Mila, who is still in elementary school. “They all know me, but suddenly they treat me kind of differently. It’s weird mixing my Linda Lindas life with my school life.”

Still, the value of having their voice heard, on subjects both silly and profound, has been deeply meaningful for the girls. At their show last fall at the stalwart Los Angeles punk venue the Smell, a whole family turned up, including a grandpa, Bela recalled. “They were telling me that they really liked ‘Monica,’” a song she wrote about her cat that she first thought didn’t measure up. “And then the grandpa started singing the song! I was like, what the heck!”

The group is gearing up to tour; it already has a date booked in Japan. The four bandmates don’t know how long this moment will last, but they know what they can make of it: “We have a lot of ideas,” Lucia said. They were buzzing to spend what little break they had together. “We can songwrite!” they cheered.

Melena Ryzik is a roving culture reporter and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment. She covered Oscar season for five years, and has also been a national correspondent in San Francisco and the mid-Atlantic states. More about Melena Ryzik

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 26 of the New York edition with the headline: The Linda Lindas Step Forward. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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