María Zardoya Is Still Hungry

María Zardoya’s friends have a saying amongst themselves: Is this movie or TV show María-proof? As in, anything remotely frightening or disturbing won’t make the cut. “I tried watching Lord of the Rings recently, and I was dissociating,” Zardoya says with a laugh. “Even that’s too scary for me!” It’s an unexpected zag for the singer-songwriter, who came of age traipsing around abandoned houses in small-town Georgia and makes smoldering psychedelic pop songs bearing a notably haunted sheen. Last year, her band, The Marías, even played two sold-out shows for real-life fans and the dearly departed alike on the lawn of Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where luminaries including Judy Garland and Chris Cornell are laid to rest.

Between Zardoya’s uncanny vocal tone and the band’s resplendent yet unsettling videos — that’s her roaming naked and alone in the snowy woods in “Lejos de Ti” — The Marías could handily score a lost David Lynch film. But Zardoya, who, by the way, arrives in head-to-toe black garb on the sunny May day we meet in Los Angeles, says she’s “the biggest scaredy cat.” She can’t bear to ingest anything but “very wholesome” media, including The Great British Baking Show and Sex and the City. “I’m attracted to darkness,” she admits, “but I can’t consume it.”

The Marías have had a breakneck few years: They’ve released two critically lauded albums, Cinema and Submarine; collaborated with superstars like Selena Gomez and Bad Bunny; and performed a sumptuous golden-hour Coachella set attended by tens of thousands of fans last month. Good luck getting tickets to their headlining shows these days; those tend to sell out in minutes. But as Zardoya keeps notching milestone after milestone in her career — we’re talking bucket-list dreams, including singing with her idol Norah Jones on a forthcoming podcast — she becomes more particular about what and whom she surrounds herself with.

“After Coachella Weekend 2, I felt just so invigorated and so excited. But then I reminded myself: ‘Bring it down a little bit. Just be steady,’” she says. “I don’t want there to be high highs or low lows, even as incredible as the high highs feel.”

Spending time in nature helps — Zardoya loves a long walk with her headphones through the mystical canyons of Los Angeles. “Trees grow so slowly, and throughout such a large period of time, that I feel like slowing down internally and listening to slow, melancholic music puts you in the same wavelength,” she says, brushing her pin-straight dark hair out of her face. But that’s not to say Zardoya isn’t still hungry. When I ask Zardoya what’s been a high point of her career with The Marías thus far, she doesn’t hesitate: “What’s to come.”

“Being vulnerable publicly is easy, because it doesn’t feel like anybody’s going to pay attention. It just feels like I’m talking to a friend.”

Zardoya’s friends often tell her she has a talent for manifesting, given that she’d actually written in her notebook about wanting to play a killer slot at Coachella and collaborate with fellow Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny long before either came to pass. (He recruited The Marías for his 2022 track “Otro Atardecer.”) Yet Zardoya views those accomplishments as products of her gumption rather than mysterious forces converging.

“I don’t know if I believe in manifestation,” she says. “I believe in: ‘This is my manifestation. What do I have to do to get it?’ Not taking a back seat and hoping that the universe does what it does. It takes hard work.”

Zardoya has always been dogged about her artistic pursuits. She spent the first few years of her life in the mountains of Puerto Rico, accruing calluses on her feet as she played among pigs, goats, lizards, and stray cats before her family moved to a small suburb of Atlanta in the late 1990s. Her father would teach her how to play Latin standards like “Cielito Lindo” on the guitar, and she’d use the chords she learned to start piecing together her own songs. Zardoya’s cousins introduced her to reggaeton during trips back to Puerto Rico, while life in Georgia offered its own musical education: Attending a nondenominational church as a child “opened my brain up to spiritually experiencing music,” Zardoya says, and going out with her friends exposed her to plenty of country. Zardoya knew she wanted a life in music, but she had no clue how to get there. “The music industry, in my mind, was at church,” she says. “I didn’t think it was actually possible to have a career in music coming from Snellville, Georgia.”

“We’ve had the hit that was an anti-hit, ‘No One Noticed,’ that I feel like has given us the freedom to just write more anti-hits.”

That changed in 2015, when a friend suggested Zardoya make a go of it in Los Angeles. In a fortuitous twist, the Atlanta advertising agency Zardoya worked for at the time was holding a Halloween costume contest with a grand prize of $5,000 — enough to get her to L.A. Sensing her chance, Zardoya crafted an elaborate getup that would play to the judges’ sensibilities. “I built a target market out of wood that I put over my shoulders with fruit,” she recalls. “And on the fruit, I had the client logos.” Zardoya won. She bought a black Nissan Altima, piled her life in there, and hoofed it out west in just two days, subsisting on chocolate-covered espresso beans to stay awake. “And then I was like, ‘Well, what do I do now?’”

Zardoya did what any intrepid musician would do upon arriving in L.A.: She started performing anywhere she could. While she was playing a handful of original songs at the long-standing dive Kibitz Room one night, her astounding pipes caught the attention of Josh Conway, who was working the sound booth. They began dating, and after a while, Zardoya asked Conway about starting a band together. She says Conway initially demurred — he had a few other projects going on. “Then one of our songs really started doing really well, and he was like, ‘Maybe there’s something to this project,’” she recalls, laughing. Conway, a drummer and producer, enlisted a few friends, including guitarist Jesse Perlman and keyboardist Edward James, to join the nascent group, and The Marías took off in earnest. “I started booking our shows, playing at pizza parlors, bars, and then touring and having our van and trailer and staying at sh*tty hotels,” Zardoya says.

“My life is so full in so many ways, and I’ve worked so hard to make it that way, that I feel like a partner should come in and complement that.”

The band’s lovestruck songs, sung by Zardoya in English and Spanish and crackling with intimate details, garnered a loyal following and, eventually, a deal with Atlantic Records and Ricky Reed’s Nice Life Recording Company (home to Lizzo and Tinashe). More recently, The Marías have lent their distinctively dreamy touch to songs by massive artists who don’t usually make jazz-imbued psych pop, including reggaeton superproducer Tainy and Puerto Rican rapper Young Miko. When Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco recently reached out to The Marías about reinterpreting Spanish star Jeanette’s iconic “El Muchacho de los Ojos Tristes,” the band jumped on it and assembled the track with the duo at The Marías’ own studio. “They’re the nicest, kindest, most patient people in the industry,” Zardoya says.

Yet even with all those starry collaborations and accolades, “it doesn’t feel like we’re a big band or that our lives have changed,” she says. That’s why she’s comfortable being vulnerable in both her music and the way she presents herself to the world — like when Zardoya opened up to fans at a show about experiencing “paralyzing anxiety” the night before. “I still feel the same. So being vulnerable publicly in that way is easy, because it just doesn’t feel like anybody’s going to pay attention. It just feels like I’m talking to a friend.”

“I don’t want there to be high highs or low lows, even as incredible as the high highs feel.”

She feels similarly about the shifting nature of The Marías’ interband dynamic, too. In the band’s early days, Zardoya and Conway’s romantic relationship begat a generative musical partnership that laid the groundwork for the group’s songwriting. But in between recording 2021’s Cinema and last year’s Submarine, the pair called it quits after eight years together while choosing to remain in the band. That tense experience informed the aching songs of Submarine, which may or may not have been written about each other.

Today, she and Conway have “finally gotten to a place in our relationship where we can talk about our dating lives,” Zardoya says. “There’s no guesswork as to if this song is about our relationship, [or if this song] is about someone else. That made it a little bit awkward and difficult in the past. It’s so much more open now in our honesty and communication now that we’ve crossed that hurdle.” If Cinema immortalized Zardoya and Conway’s romance, and Submarine explored the process of their breakup, “the next step is almost like the aftermath of a breakup and the self-discovery” that comes with that, she says.

The day after we meet, Zardoya will decamp to New York to continue writing The Marías’ next album. New music is the one area where she seems circumspect about revealing too much; all she says is that The Marías plan to experiment with instruments and song structures, especially after stumbling into TikTok virality earlier this year. “We’ve had the hit that was an anti-hit, ‘No One Noticed,’ that I feel like has given us the freedom to just write more anti-hits,” she says of the track, which she initially leaked herself following label requests for more uptempo music. When I ask Zardoya if she has plans to release any music of her own outside of The Marías, she becomes even more cryptic. “Perhaps,” she says, stone-faced. “No radio-friendly songs for that project.”

What she can say, though, is that she’s been absorbing inspiration in all sorts of places lately. The morning we connected in L.A., she had just been working on a new song informed by a recent romance that took her by surprise. “I’ve been broken up and single for two and a half years, and I was like, ‘Maybe I’ll start dating,’” she says. “I started seeing this guy who was just so gentle with me, gentle in the way that he’d kiss me, gentle in the way that he touched me, gentle in… the slowness that we’re taking things.” She woke up that day, words and melodies started flowing, and all of a sudden a song materialized.

Zardoya had been a serial monogamist for much of her life until she and Conway broke up a few years ago. Taking that leap into the unknown was its own sort of terror — and she is famously not into being scared. Still, she realized that she needed to be alone for a while in order to move forward. “My life is so full in so many ways, and I’ve worked so hard to make it that way, that I feel like a partner should come in and complement that,” she says. “I’m financially independent. I love my friends. I love my family. I don’t need anything from them except to just be kind. That’s all I want: Kindness, gentleness, a calm kind of love. And unless it’s that, I’m not entertaining it.”

Top Image Credits: Miss Claire Sullivan corset, Donna Karan skirt c/o Uma, Chanel Fine Jewelry necklace, Jimmy Choo shoes