The Linda Lindas Graduate to Brooklyn Steel
Five years ago, four kids in cardigans played a song in a Los Angeles public library and accidentally detonated a movement. Tonight, they play Brooklyn Steel — a 1,800-capacity former steel-processing plant on Frost Street — and the joke is officially over. The Linda Lindas are not the plucky viral moment anymore. They're a headliner.
If you somehow missed the origin story: in May 2021, the Los Angeles Public Library posted footage of the band ripping through "Racist, Sexist Boy" at a TEENtastic Tuesdays event. The song — written by drummer Mila de la Garza about a classmate who told her his father said to stay away from Chinese people — went off like a flare. Tom Morello, Flea, Thurston Moore, Kathleen Hanna, and Kid Cudi all boosted it. Author Viet Thanh Nguyen put it plainly: "'Racist, Sexist Boy' is the song we need now." Within days, Epitaph Records — the label that housed Bad Religion and NOFX — had signed them.
The part that still short-circuits people's brains is the ages. The Linda Lindas are Bela Salazar, Eloise Wong, and sisters Lucia and Mila de la Garza. Mila, the drummer who started this whole thing, was a grade-schooler when the video hit. She turns 16 this week. These are not seasoned pros faking youthful energy. This is genuinely a band that grew up on stage, in public, at a volume most of us reserve for our worst decisions.
And grow they did. The debut, Growing Up (2022), was exactly what the title promised — bright, bratty, unpretentious punk with hooks that stuck. The follow-up, No Obligation (2024), was tighter, angrier, and more assured, the sound of a band that had toured enough to know what it wanted. Along the way they scored and appeared in Amy Poehler's Netflix film Moxie, opened for Bikini Kill at the Hollywood Palladium, played Coachella, became the first band to perform at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and — in the flex to end all flexes — opened for the Rolling Stones at SoFi Stadium in July 2024.
Which brings us to why tonight matters. Brooklyn Steel is a real graduation. This is not a scrappy club with a low ceiling and a merch table by the bathroom. It's a purpose-scaled Bowery Presents room built to make a guitar band sound enormous, the kind of stage where a chorus you could once shout back at arm's length now bounces off the rafters. Bands break here or they don't. The step up from the sweaty-club circuit to an 1,800-cap room is the exact moment you find out whether the songs can fill the space — whether "Racist, Sexist Boy" hits as hard from the back of a former steel plant as it did in a library reading room.
Here's the bet: it will. The whole appeal of the Linda Lindas was never the novelty of their age. It was that the songs were good, the politics were unfussy and real, and the joy was non-negotiable. That travels. That fills a room.
So go tonight and watch a Brooklyn rite of passage in real time — a band that started as a clip your aunt shared, standing on one of the borough's better stages, entirely earning it. The cardigans, we're told, remain undefeated.
Sources: Brooklyn Steel (JamBase); The Linda Lindas (Wikipedia)