Last night, the Linda Lindas — the teen-girl punk-rock band whose performance of their song “Racist, Sexist Boy” went viral last month — made their late-night television debut. The four girls, Mila, Eloise, Lucia and Bela, appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, where they discussed what it was like to find out they were suddenly famous.
“I was in history class and my phone kept buzzing, and my teacher kept looking at me like, What are you doing? And I opened my Instagram and my whole feed was just us,” Bela, who at 16 is the band’s oldest member, said in the interview.
They performed their songs “Claudia Kishi,” which is based off of an Asian American character from The Baby-Sitters Club series, and their banger “Racist, Sexist Boy,” which was inspired by a racist experience the band’s youngest member, Mila, had at school.
“A boy from school told me that his dad told him to stay away from Chinese people, and I told him that I was Chinese and he backed away from me,” Mila explained. “There’s a lot of sexism around boys our age, and really every age. And so we were really angry and we decided to write a song about it,” Eloise added.
Despite their seemingly overnight success, the Linda Lindas have been performing together since 2018. Earlier this year, they appeared in the Netflix film Moxie! and they recently signed a record deal with Epitaph. As for the racist, sexist boy who inspired the song, the girls don’t care about him at all.
“It doesn’t really matter anymore,” Mila said.
