Over lunch in Williamsburg, María Zardoya—namesake and lead vocalist for the indie-pop band the Marías—is every bit as warm and effervescent as her music. Sliding into a small booth, we start chatting like old friends catching up after a whirlwind year—and that it really has been for Zardoya.
To sum it up: In 2024, the Marías released their second studio album, Submarine, just after Zardoya and the band’s drummer, Josh Conway, had ended their long-term relationship. The split left not only fans wondering whether the Marías would continue, but Zardoya as well.
The Marías are, indeed, still together, from that moment of uncertainty came Zardoya’s new, parallel solo project, Not for Radio—and an album, Melt, out today. Not for Radio represents a creative reset born from heartbreak… and a bit of an identity crisis. “Post break-up, I had so many questions. Who am I as an individual after a seven-year relationship? Who am I without the context of a relationship? That led me to the question of who I am musically without the context of this relationship,” Zardoya says.
To find out, she teamed up with songwriter Sam Evian. “I told Sam I was going through it and had so much I wanted to say. I wrote a song and he sent me over a track that he had been working on,” she says. She then brought in Luca Buccellati, who had worked with her on the Marías’ “No One Noticed.” That first experiment eventually became “Not the Only One,” the sixth track on Melt, though it would be about a year before it had an album to notch into.
In February, Zardoya, Evian, and Buccellati headed to upstate New York for three weeks of writing and recording—an unlikely setting for the San Juan-born artist. “I wanted to record somewhere totally out of my comfort zone, and outside of LA,” she explains. “I’m Puerto Rican and an island girly, so the polar opposite was going to upstate New York in the dead of winter.” Between sessions, they took long walks through the woods and ate farm-fresh duck eggs.
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Melt’s softly gothic sound may feel familiar to fans of the Marías, whose production leaned toward the lush, layered, and hypnotic, but it’s slower, moodier. “The Marías are very much a band, but from day one, Josh and I have written all of the music. So what you get is 50-50 Josh’s musical DNA and mine,” Zardoya says. “Whereas with my solo project, I wanted this to feel like music you’d listen to in nature while sitting under a tree, or on the train looking out a window.” (If ever a song began to stray from the sensibility she was after, Zardoya recalls, she’d describe it as “not vampire enough!”)
Its tone draws as much from the wintry stillness of those New York woods as from Evian and Buccellati’s love of The Lord of the Rings (which, yes, they got Zardoya into, too). “Sam, Luca, and I worked so seamlessly because we have such similar musical DNA. We’re inspired by the same things,” Zardoya says. “A song called ‘Back to You’ felt like the stars were aligning—the melody came out of nowhere. We were all just in our little stations, creating, and then before we knew it, we had a whole song.” The trio were delighted to discover, after the song was finished, that the planets had quite literally been aligned that night.
A week before the album’s release, Zardoya hosted an elaborate listening party for fans at Blithewold Garden, on Bard College’s campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. “I deeply care about attention to detail in the world-building,” she tells me. “I wanted people to tangibly feel the album with their senses.”
After a quick Metro-North ride to Poughkeepsie, I’m dropped right into the gothic garden of her dreams—like a party co-hosted by Mary Shelley and Emerald Fennell. Candelabras flicker beside towering arrangements of deep calla lilies, stacks of shortbread cookies six inches high, fresh sandwiches, and bouquets made of vegetables. For a final flourish, guests—all handed CD players loaded with the new album—pose for tintype portraits and press wildflowers into keepsakes.
It all feels perfectly of a piece with the world of Melt—textured, whimsical, romantic, surreal—and Zardoya’s vision for her brave new era. “I’m just excited for people to get to know me in a different way,” she says, smiling.
