Album Review: Growing Up by The Linda Lindas

The Linda Lindas make no attempt to hide their youth. They named their debut album Growing Up, and its title track is a spirited pop-punk anthem celebrating the vigour and camaraderie of children who happen to grow up together, making mistakes and building character. If that song was the only thing to go by, one might think the Linda Lindas are some kind of Hannah Montana reboot, but they did not make a Disney album.

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A May 2021 performance of their new song "Racist, Sexist, Boy" at the LA Public Library turned the band - formed of sisters Mila and Lucia de la Garza, their cousin Eloise Wong and family friend Bela Salzar - into overnight sensations. Perhaps the facts of the two minute viral video - the library setting, the contrast of the girl's affable demeanor with the righteous fury of their rip-roaring anthem - distracted from a fundamental truth; "Racist, Sexist Boy" is an undeniably great song. Inspired by an interaction between Mila and a classmate whose dad told him to stay away from Chinese people, the song channels the same rage that defined the best riot grrrl music of the '90s; tackling intergenerational trauma while making its narrator sound triumphant, rather than victimized.

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In the mid 1970's, punk rock burst onto the scene. A genre that touted itself as more authentic than several artists that were prominent in the mid-70's music scene. It was a genre said to be based around chaos, as opposed to the currated media images many recording artists of the era had. It is perhaps no surprise that in a genre so dedicated to subversion of the rules; one of the cornerstones of the genre, Sex Pistols, began subverting the rules of the genre almost immediately.

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