You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.

I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway.

The Marias is a band from Los Angeles, made up of Maria Zardoya, Josh Conway, Jesse Pearlman, and Edward James.

They released their first EPs in 2017 and 2018, and their first album in 2021.

But then, as you'll hear, there was a period of a lot of uncertainty around the band's future.

Eventually, their second album, Submarine, came out in 2024, and it was incredibly successful.

Stereogum called it one of the best

albums of the year, and the band was nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist. But all of that

almost didn't happen. I talked to Maria about the making of their hit song No One Noticed.

The story's beginning, middle, and end all took place during different eras of the band's existence.

In the middle section, when maybe they weren't going to even be a band anymore,

Maria enlisted the help of Grammy-nominated producer John Luca Bucillotti,

and I spoke to Luca for this episode as well.

Maybe I lost my mind.

No one noticed.

My name is Maria and I'm in a band called The Marias.

Do you remember what was happening on the first day that you started thinking about this song?

Yeah, it was 2020 peak pandemic.

So we were just in our apartment writing songs. And when you say we, who's that?

Josh and I. Josh and I lived together at the time. Josh is also the drummer of the marias. And so we just

wake up and write songs, go to bed, write songs. You know, we couldn't do much else except for

write songs and then just kind of

...