The Marías’ next life

The Marías appear on the cover of the Spring 2024 Issue — head to the AP Shop to grab a copy.

There’s a scene in Three Colors Blue, the 1993 film directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, where the protagonist, Julie, visits her mother after walking around in an intense state of grief. She’s lost her husband and daughter to a horrific car accident and is in the thick of selling off her home, and everything in it, except for a transfixing lamp of blue beads. “I want no possessions, no memories, no friends, no lovers. They’re all traps,” she confesses. All these years later, the scene remains deeply arresting, brilliantly acted, and crushingly real. It seizes you with her alienation, her withdrawal, the loss of her whole world — and the idea that, eventually, she will be dared to rebuild a new one. The movie, as it turns out, served as a massive inspiration for María Zardoya, the soul-melting vocalist of the Marías, and the group’s second album, Submarine.

“The blue was representing this grief and loss, but as the movie went on, it started representing hope and aspiration for the future — and that’s how this album process happened for us,” she says from drummer Josh Conway’s house in Silverlake.

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The new record, set to arrive later this spring, turns inward, plunging deep below the surface to explore a torrent of demanding thoughts and feelings in search of an inner calm. You can hear that transition, too, as the album begins sounding huge — like the heft of that emotional strain personified — and then slowly gets warmer, driftier, lighter. Blue, rather than their signature red, represents their past couple of years best, commencing a whole new iteration of the Marías.

Let’s get it out of the way: María and Conway, who’ve been together since the band’s inception, are no longer in a relationship. The grief and loss in question point to this new phase of their lives, one where they move forward as friends and collaborators. When everything ended — sometime after their Coachella performance in 2022 — they resolved to adjust the relationship, rather than break up the band.

The feeling had been “in the air,” Conway says, for months. Consider that the duo toured, lived, and wrote together, on top of being business partners and owners of a dog named Lucy, who wanders around the room during the Zoom call, becoming increasingly codependent. Space to grow became scant, and their senses of self, ever intertwined, were getting murky. “When you do so much together and you don’t have that breathing room, it’s like, ‘Who am I without María, or who’s María without Josh?’” Conway suggests. “It’s almost impossible to figure that out when you’re in the same room all the time.”

They have a lot of stops and starts as they begin to explain. It’s their first conversation about the breakup, and both are, understandably, still figuring out how they want to talk about it, but they are adamant that losing each other wasn’t an option. “To say that I am never going to talk to you again because we can’t be romantic is so finite and so extreme,” María shares. “If you truly love and respect the person, [the relationship] can evolve, and you can still be in each other’s lives — just as a different iteration of what it was.” You don’t need to look closely to see that the love between them still comes easy. They sit next to each other during the call, and often when Conway speaks, María will turn her head and stare at him, fixating on his responses.

It could’ve gone terribly. Instead, the breakup reinvigorated them, bringing light to their other two members — guitarist Jesse Perlman and keyboardist Edward James — who were often relegated to the background, as the relationship, involuntarily, dominated the band dynamic. “I’m so proud of them both and how they got through it and what they created out of it. It’s been a really special time this past year,” Perlman beams, adding that they’ve gotten far more collaborative this round. María remains the visionary, devising the mood and aesthetic that will define the album, whereas Conway helms the production, but James and Perlman both have more of a say. As James describes, “It feels very much like it’s all out on the table.” They talk about plans before they’re executed, and everything has a full-band feel again. Though María and Conway still write songs together in private, they relish being able to share them when they have legs. “Always my favorite moment is sending it to them and getting the first fresh ears on it — on the people that matter most,” Conway says. 

As they are discovering, love isn’t bound to sex. Love can also be friendship. “It truly is a family — it’s a chosen family,” James says. He can’t remember a day within the last eight years when they weren’t texting or hanging out with each other, especially as they gear up for the album rollout. This past December, the band even took their first proper vacation together to Vieques, a Caribbean island off the Puerto Rico coast, to visit María’s family. There, they spent time lazing on the beach and toured Mosquito Bay, where hundreds of thousands of microscopic organisms called dinoflagellates cast an eerie, supernatural radiance when agitated, making the water glimmer like stars. (This will sound familiar if you’ve seen Life of Pi, where the main character swirls the water with his hand before a whale knocks him off his raft.) Her family cooked paella for the band, and they also celebrated María’s birthday, culminating in “an amazing bonding experience,” as James tells it. Then, a few weeks later, they decided to go skydiving — another homage to Three Colors Blue, whether conscious or not, as people are seen falling throughout the film to mirror a connection to the past.

“A year ago, you couldn’t pay me all the money in the world to do it, and you probably couldn’t up until I jumped out of the plane,” James says. “But us having that foray into that world together, there’s so much trust that develops that. Josh and Jesse were really excited about skydiving. I was extraordinarily anxious.”

“You weren’t going to do it,” Perlman adds.

“I was trying to come up with every excuse I could,” James laughs. “María was sending me really sweet and uplifting texts the morning of trying to get me to calm down about it. Then once you do it, it’s just another notch in the belt of overcoming and developing something together.” It’s a lot like taking psychedelics, the abrupt abandonment of familiarity in exchange for greater unknowns, that requires trust, patience, and good friends. You still look the same, but the experience can be shapeshifting as you embrace uncertainty and begin anew, whatever that might mean. 

The trajectory, and story, of the Marías is one all its own. Formed in 2016, the band rattled off a pair of uniformly excellent EPs, Superclean, Vol. 1 and 2, which boasted an impossibly stylish set of songs that touched on jazz, disco, indie pop, and beyond. “Dreamy” is a word that’s dramatically overused to describe music, but there aren’t many other adjectives that feel more apt. A few years later, they got to work on their debut album. The foundation of 2021’s CINEMA was an ode to film, nodding to both their early days of writing professional music for movies and TV and the medium that intensified their bond. The songs sounded sleeker, filled with synths and lush string arrangements that made them feel like a soundtrack, rather than an LP on a major label. “Un Millón” was inspired by María’s native Puerto Rico, where she grew up listening to reggaeton, while “All I Really Want Is You” pulsed with bass and seduction, calling back to when Conway and María would take acid and wander around their neighborhood to connect with nature and each other during pandemic lockdowns.

The music they create draws little comparison, as well. It’s inherently psychedelic, informed by Beach House, Radiohead, and Tame Impala’s Lonerism — one of Conway and Perlman’s favorite records of all time — as well as dozens of films, naturally, but it’s also wholly original. When you ask for suggestions of bands that sound like the Marías, groups like Men I Trust, L’Impératrice, and Alvvays come to mind, but if you want to scratch that itch, you just have to delve deeper into their discography and hope for new music.

As a follow-up, Submarine is a daring but necessary departure, subverting CINEMA with thoughtful detail. Their reverence for film still exists, but the strings that made those songs so divine have slipped away as the band tap into dream pop, trip-hop, and heavier electronics. Opener “Ride” takes that leap forward with full-throttled bass and Auto-Tuned vocals that sound gargantuan, launching you deep into another world. Clearly, this is not the Marías that you have come to know. This is a wickedly different experience, and band, for that matter, and they welcome you to take part in its alienness.

To understand the full scope of the record, though, you must wear headphones. Immersion is essential and can frequently evoke a euphoric experience, heightening the intimacy but also the isolation. That’s key to connecting with María’s lyrics. Yes, the music’s still a vibe, but her words, delivered in a silky purr, unfurl the emotional heaviness and healing that took months to wade through. It was a heady process, but the band didn’t go into Submarine with specific rules or goals in mind — only, according to María, to be unafraid to lay her vulnerabilities bare. She does so heroically, often sinking into swirling melancholy (“Come on, don’t leave me/It can’t be that easy babe,” she coos on “No One Noticed”) that represents “being underwater and exploring this more in-depth part of who you are.” Whenever their friends have come over to listen to the record, Conway will hand them a pair and leave the room for the next 45 minutes so they can submerge themselves in the music.

It’s partially the confluence of all of their influences, too. María grew up listening to Latin and urban music, though she went deep into trip-hop for this record, while Perlman and Conway lean toward the indie realm. James has an affinity for jazz. “It’s like a Venn diagram of all of our favorite influences, and then in the middle is just the sound you’re going to get,” Perlman says.

“Hamptons,” for one, transports the band out of their native LA and into the luxurious world of NYC overtop skittering electronica, whereas “If Only,” with its longing trumpet, could live inside of a lounge that still houses dusty photos of Billie Holiday. “Blur,” meanwhile, adopts a nocturnal and smoggy feel, sounding as if it were cut from the same sessions as Portishead’s Dummy. “It reminded me of The Virgin Suicides soundtrack, the Air soundtrack, so the song was called ‘Virgin Suicides’ for a long time before we landed on ‘Blur,’” María shares. The track started as a long jam — much like how “Paranoia” and “Real Life” found their roots — while Conway was on a solo trip in Europe between June and July 2023. They had a drum loop going, and Perlman was playing the chords back and forth. Then Conway dismantled the 30-minute session, working his magic to condense the song into four minutes. When he returned, the band wrote the second half of the album within three weeks. “The inspiration was just flowing,” Conway says. 

Most jarring is the way the album suddenly ends, which Conway likens to “getting spit out of that submarine” and flung back to reality. “I think with ‘Sienna,’ at the very end, it envelops you in this wall of sound, almost like you’re underwater and kind of drowning a bit, and then it stopping abruptly is finally coming up for air,” María says. The feeling is equivalent to listening on headphones, being totally absorbed in the music, and suddenly yanking them off your head. It’s disorienting yet thoroughly fascinating and satisfying. The record also wraps with the sound from the “Ride” intro, making it feel like a complete journey. “One thing about us, we love a good bookend,” Conway jokes.

Working out how to translate the songs live will be another jigsaw, and they’ve already completed a few rehearsals. Onstage, the Marías exude a seductive cool, adding as much flair to their gigs as they do to their studio songs. Most anyone who attended the shows behind CINEMA can attest to the impressive alchemy that took hold as the band flipped from rock to reggaeton to Britney Spears covers with a velvet touch. They have been playing “Run Your Mouth,” a bouncy song about being conflict avoidant, and the first preview of Submarine, as far back as 2022, including their set at Desert Daze, where the band graced the main stage on the festival’s final night. The show was sensational, but before they took the stage, as María later detailed on Instagram, she experienced a panic attack, one in a series that had been happening all week long leading up to the performance.

Going into their new era, however, she’s less encumbered by that intense anxiety and feels more zen. Therapy and meditation have been magic, having learned to be more present in her body and out of her mind. Even through a screen, she seems more confident, as do the rest of the band. “This is the longest that I’ve been on my own, per se, and I’m learning just so much about myself, and as a result, I am able to communicate better and be there for my friends better and be a better artist because I’m getting to know myself instead of getting to know myself in the reflection of somebody else,” María says.

As for the rest of the band? It helps that Conway and Perlman have a history of playing in bands together since they were 11 or 12 years old, so they aren’t daunted by the crowds. “I feel like my body shuts down starting an hour before the show,” James admits, though the anxiety melts when he hits the first couple of notes. By the end of the CINEMA run, the routine became fixed, and he was a lot more at home onstage.

“Something that I’m working on is transforming the negative anxiety to excitement,” María explains. “Because it’s the same sensation in your body. It’s just the way that you think about [it], so you can either be like, ‘Oh, my God, my heart is racing. This is so bad.’ Or, ‘Oh, my God, my heart is racing. This is so exciting. I can’t wait.’” It’s all a process — rediscovering yourself, turning pain into purpose, is a process. Along the way, that blue, once a symbol of extraordinary sorrow, has morphed into hope, tranquility, and liberation. She let go, looked forward, and embraced her next life. Perhaps it will inspire you to find a similar serenity as you listen to the album from front to back, hopefully near the water as the waves break.

Photos by Sarah Pardini

Styling by Tabitha Sanchez

Makeup by Leticia Llesmin

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