The Linda Lindas signing to Warner/Reprise was always going to mean something bigger was coming — and here it is.
A month after "Burning Out" announced their major-label arrival, the band have confirmed their new album Gotta Get Out is on the way. They've also dropped "Closer," a collaboration with Hayley Williams, and honestly, that pairing makes complete sense — two generations of women doing loud, uncompromising guitar music, one lot just getting started, the other still one of the most credible voices in the room.
From Viral Moment to Major Label Reality
We've watched the Linda Lindas go from a library performance that the internet lost its mind over to a proper recording career, and the trajectory has been clean. No detours into whatever sound was trending. No embarrassing pivot. They stayed exactly who they were, which is probably why Paramore's Hayley Williams wanted her name on one of their tracks.
"Closer" is the kind of collaboration that works because neither party needs the other for credibility. Williams doesn't need a youth injection, and the Linda Lindas don't need her cosign to prove they belong. When it works on those terms, you get something that sounds natural rather than engineered. We'll let the music speak for itself, but the fact that it exists at all says something about how seriously people in the industry are taking this band now.
The major-label move — Warner/Reprise specifically — raised a few eyebrows when it was announced. It always does. There's a reasonable version of the concern: you spend years as an independent band with a specific identity, and then the machine gets involved. [We've seen that tension before with artists who've had to fight to keep their sound intact](/getohedz/music/jonas-blue-rebranded-learned-an-instrument-called-ai-absolutely-horrendous). The Linda Lindas, to their credit, don't sound like a band who are going to let anyone sand the edges off them.
What *Gotta Get Out* Needs to Do
The album title tells you something about the mood. There's an urgency to it — not desperation, but the feeling of needing to move, needing to get clear of something. For a band who built their name on music that felt genuinely restless and teenage in the best sense, that energy translating into a full album is the thing we're watching for.
"Burning Out" set a solid baseline. "Closer" suggests they're comfortable sharing space with someone else's voice without losing their own. Whether Gotta Get Out sustains that across a full record is the real question. Major-label debuts have a way of exposing whether a band has enough songs or just enough of an idea.
We're optimistic. Not blindly — we've been burned before — but there's a track record here that earns some good faith. The Linda Lindas have never once sounded like they were performing at being themselves.
Our take: Gotta Get Out has the potential to be one of the more interesting rock albums this year precisely because the Linda Lindas refuse to behave like a band who need to prove anything. The Hayley Williams feature is a statement of intent, not a marketing move. Now they've got to back it up for twelve tracks.