The Marías - No One Noticed

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 Hrishikesh Hirway. This episode of Song Exploder is brought to you by Booking.com. My wife and I have been thinking about visiting some of our friends in Philadelphia this summer. And so while we've been daydreaming, I've been looking on Booking.com to check out places where we might stay in Philly. I put in our dates, and there are over 100 options listed. So I'm gonna start narrowing things down. I'm gonna choose places that have an eight or higher rating and a king bed available. And then I'm gonna focus on hotels in one of my favorite neighborhoods, the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood. And look, there's a hotel here with a 9.0 rating, and there's a note on the site that says, "Couples in particular like this hotel. They rated it a 9.5 for a two-person trip." All right, so look at that. That sounds pretty awesome. You can find exactly what you're booking for. Booking.com, booking.yeah. Book today on the site or in the app. Summer. It's when we share more time, more memories, and more photos. And at AT&T, the iPhone 17 Pro is your summer essential. Its center stage front camera auto adjusts the frame to fit everyone into group selfies. You don't even have to turn your phone. And AT&T makes sharing those pics with everyone easy. Right now at AT&T, ask how you can get the iPhone 17 Pro on them with eligible iPhone trade-in, any condition. Requires trade-in of iPhone 15 Plus or higher, excluding iPhone 16E and 17E. Requires eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply. Subject to change. Visit att.com/iphone or visit an AT&T store for details. [upbeat jingle] [gentle music] The Marias is a band from Los Angeles made up of Maria Zardoya, Josh Conway, Jesse Perlman, and Edward Jaynes. 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 gonna even be a band anymore, Maria enlisted the help of Grammy-nominated producer Gianluca Buccellari, and I spoke to Luca for this episode as well.

[singing] Maybe I lost my mind. No one noticed. 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'd 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 kinda