Artist: The Linda Lindas
Album: Gotta Get Out
Release Date: August 28, 2026
Label: Reprise Records
Rating: ★★★★½☆ (4.5/5)
Every time I write about The Linda Lindas, I seem to come back to the same phrase: tremendous growth. It has followed nearly every album and live review because there has always been something extraordinary about watching four musicians develop in real time, particularly when they started so young. But on Gotta Get Out, their third studio album, that growth finally feels like it has crossed a threshold. For the first time, I don’t feel like I’m listening to the band full of little girls we came to know years ago. I’m listening to four young women who are becoming remarkably assured musicians.
Mila de la Garza, the youngest member, just turned 16. Think about that for a second. She has essentially spent half of her life playing in a touring punk rock band. Bela Salazar, Eloise Wong and Lucia de la Garza have similarly spent formative years learning how to write songs, record albums and command stages while simultaneously figuring out who they are. That unusual timeline has always been part of The Linda Lindas’ story, but Gotta Get Out may be the first album where their ages become significantly less interesting than the music they’re making.
Part of the difference is how they made it. The Linda Lindas isolated themselves for intensive writing sessions in Palm Springs and Long Beach, including a retreat where phones were put away and the four were left to write together. That approach matters because previous Linda Lindas albums could sometimes feel like collections of four individual musical personalities. On Gotta Get Out, those personalities remain intact, but they’re beginning to fuse.
On No Obligation, I could often tell almost immediately who was behind a song. Bela’s writing could lean toward Spanish-language material and an earthier guitar sensibility. Lucia has always struck me as the band’s indie-rock maven, with traces of bedroom pop and a tendency to write inward. Her songs contemplate getting older, changing, losing energy, wanting to escape and trying to make sense of the strange emotional exhaustion that can accompany adolescence.
Eloise, meanwhile, is the punk and hardcore kid. Her writing frequently looks beyond herself. She’s interested in politics, money, power, what we’re voting for, what we’re participating in and how other people are being treated. There is often something bigger at stake in an Eloise song than Eloise herself.
You can still hear those distinctions on Gotta Get Out, especially during its first half. There are moments when my immediate reaction remains, “That’s a Lucia song,” or “That’s Eloise.” But as the record progresses, something changes. Somewhere around the halfway point, those individual signatures begin melting together, and Gotta Get Out increasingly stops sounding like four young songwriters contributing material to the same album.
It starts sounding like The Linda Lindas.
“Closer,” featuring Hayley Williams, is one of the clearest bridges between those two ideas. The song began with Bela and Lucia and eventually became a full-band composition, with Williams joining them in the studio and contributing to the bridge. Her presence is noticeable, and there is a Paramore-like melodic force to the track that is difficult to miss. But the collaboration doesn’t swallow The Linda Lindas. Instead, it points toward the heavier, more polished alternative rock territory they’re increasingly capable of occupying.
More importantly, “Closer” deals with something that keeps resurfacing throughout Gotta Get Out: time. Getting older. Watching things change. Wanting to hold onto something while simultaneously understanding that you can’t.
That subject feels different coming from The Linda Lindas now because they actually have some history to look back on.
There are songs across the record where Lucia appears to be dealing with heartbreak, distance and the mourning of relationships. Whether those relationships are romantic or platonic is less important than the fact that this emotional perspective wasn’t really available to the band when they were children. These are young women who are finally old enough to have fallen in love, lost people, outgrown friendships and discovered that growing up involves grieving versions of your life that aren’t coming back.
That gives Gotta Get Out a weight that No Obligation, as much as I enjoyed that album, didn’t quite possess.
It also makes the record’s title feel appropriate. There is restlessness everywhere. The desire to move, leave, change, escape and get somewhere else exists alongside an increasing awareness that movement has consequences. The Linda Lindas aren’t writing about adulthood from the outside anymore. They’re beginning to participate in it.
Musically, that transition is just as noticeable.
Eloise and Lucia carry much of the vocal weight across the album, while Bela is less dominant as a lead vocalist than she has sometimes been in the past. But I don’t hear that as Bela receding from the band. If anything, it makes me pay more attention to what she’s doing with the guitar. Her playing is becoming increasingly technical and confident, and Gotta Get Out gives the impression of a musician becoming more interested in what she can communicate through the instrument itself.
Mila’s development is equally remarkable simply because of the timeline involved. There is a difference between a kid who can impressively play drums and a drummer who understands how to anchor a rock band. At this point, she has years of touring and recording behind her, and the rhythm section no longer feels like something remarkable because of her age. It simply works.
That may be the most significant compliment I can give this album. Increasingly, there is no need to grade The Linda Lindas on a curve.
The production helps. Carlos de la Garza, Lucia and Mila’s father and Eloise’s uncle, has been behind the board throughout much of the band’s recording career, and Gotta Get Out sounds polished without becoming sterile. Some material originating in the band’s writing sessions survived into the finished recordings, preserving some of the spontaneity of four people locked in a room figuring out what happens next.
You can hear the work. You can hear the intention. You can hear the technical leveling up. And you can hear four musicians becoming increasingly comfortable enough with their own abilities to borrow from one another.
That is why the second half of Gotta Get Out interests me so much. The question of who wrote what becomes less important. Bela’s guitar instincts, Lucia’s melodic introspection, Eloise’s punk urgency and Mila’s increasingly assured rhythmic foundation stop existing in separate compartments. The band’s individual tastes don’t disappear. They become ingredients. That is what a band is supposed to do.
Ironically, hearing how developed those individual personalities have become also makes me curious about what each of these women might eventually do outside The Linda Lindas. That isn’t because I expect or want the band to break up. It is because their musical identities are already distinct enough that I can imagine completely different creative directions branching outward from this group someday.
But Gotta Get Out makes an equally compelling argument for what happens when those identities stay together.
This is not a perfect album. The first half occasionally exposes the seams between the band’s different songwriting personalities, and there are moments when their influences are still more audible than whatever will ultimately replace them. At 4.5 stars, there is still room above them.
What’s extraordinary is how much room there is ahead of them.
I don’t hesitate to say that Gotta Get Out is operating at a level where a Grammy nomination no longer sounds like an absurd prediction. Whether that recognition comes for this album, an individual song or something they haven’t made yet is impossible to know. Awards are also hardly the definitive measure of whether a record succeeds, but the caliber of the work has definitively changed.
The Linda Lindas were once fascinating because they were little girls playing punk rock with a level of confidence and skill that seemed impossible for their ages. Then they became teenagers getting noticeably better every time you saw them.
Gotta Get Out complicates that narrative because “good for their age” is rapidly becoming an inadequate way to describe them. They’re still growing. They’re still experimenting. They’re still figuring out how four very different musical personalities fit inside one band.
But now we’re hearing what happens when all of those years of growing up together begin to pay off. The Linda Lindas aren’t merely showing potential anymore.
They’re starting to fulfill it.
Featured image credit: Jaxon Whittington
