Lucia admits they were essentially ripping off All We Know is Falling, after all, Paramore’s hugely underrated 2005 debut. “People are gonna like this,” she remembers thinking, “that she’s doing emo music, dipping her toe into it.” The song traces a mid-aughts formula that’s familiar but still stirring and satisfying. In the verse: crunch guitar as tight as a baby’s fist. In the soaring half-time chorus: backing vocals that are alternately ghostly-reverbed and angrily hurled from the back of the room, while between them Williams’ voice casts heavenward. It might sound like a Paramore song featuring The Linda Lindas rather than the other way around, but increasingly the band’s MO is to be masterful chameleons and collaborators, so that’s no diss. 

At this point, The Linda Lindas’ roll call of famous friends is almost too well documented that it sometimes threatens to eclipse their actual work, burying the lede. It’s the only thing more widely documented than how they first came onto people’s radars: a viral pandemic moment of them sneering through a white-knuckle microsong called “Racist Sexist Boy” in the incongruous setting of the LA Public Library. The video seemingly landed on the for-you pages of people like Thurston Moore and Tom Morello, who quickly began spreading the world. The latter has since invited them to play his activism all-dayer, Power to the People, alongside Springsteen, Joan Baez, and other outspoken anti-fascist musicians. 

But The Linda Lindas had been a band for three years at that point and already mixed in circles with riot grrrl foremother Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, who’d seen them at LA’s women-curated festival Gxrlschool. Karen O was there too. After the library performance, the release of their 2022 debut, and their performance in Amy Poehler’s  film, they would go on to add a stadium tour with Green Day and Smashing Pumpkins to their CV. (“Billy Corgan rode by on a golf cart. He waved at us,” Eloise remembers.) They’ve played with almost every other indie rock and punk-adjacent legend you can think of since then: Rancid, Paramore, Blondie, The Breeders. They even got Weird Al playing accordion on a track from their last album. And just this month the new Green Day film, , gives them a shout out. It happened to The Linda Lindas; it could happen to us! They have become shorthand for punk youth storming the gates. 

All of that said, Eloise is never more animated than when she’s talking about local bands and her backyard DIY scene, “especially smaller places. There’s this place called Bad Dog Compound over here, which is basically a garage. I saw Special Forces from San Luis Obispo there recently, and that was super fun. Once I saw this band called A Place We’ve Always Been there, and it’s like a tiny room, but everyone is giving all of their energy to singing the lyrics and dancing and just having fun with each other. I saw this band called Wife, and they were really good. The energy of their music was just amazing. They were mathy and chaotic like All, and then they had the groove of, like, Soulside, and it just made me so happy.” 

If one of her bandmates didn’t stop her, she’d roll right on, and I wouldn’t mind. She has that unbeatable combo of passion, talent, and encyclopaedic retention – truly doing the job she was made for. “I think there’s nothing like live music, and being one with a crowd like that,” she continues. “It really gives you hope. That’s what inspires me – seeing other people play.”