Nobody wrote "No One Noticed" to be a hit. That was, by María Zardoya's own account, the point. Nine years after she and Josh Conway met at a Los Angeles dive bar attached to a deli, the song became the biggest thing The Marías have ever released, and it did so on its own timeline, spreading through TikTok in late 2024 the way a rumor spreads, slowly and then all at once.
A Decade at the Kibitz Room
The origin story has been told enough times to feel almost mythic: Zardoya performing a set at the Kibitz Room, the small bar attached to Canter's Deli, while Josh Conway ran sound for the first time in his life. "Once in LA, I was trying to play anywhere that would let me," she has said of that night in 2016. "Josh was running sound that night, and that's where we met." They wrote together almost immediately, dated for seven years, and built The Marías around a sound Zardoya sums up in one word: dreamy.
That word has carried the band from Superclean-era club bills through 2021's CINEMA, a Grammy-nominated homage to film scored largely inside their own apartment, to a 2022 Coachella set that landed on year-end best-of lists and a feature from Bad Bunny that put them in front of stadium crowds as large as 80,000. But nothing the band released matched what happened with a song about the exact moment their partnership stopped being romantic.
The Anti-Pop Song
"No One Noticed" appears on Submarine, the 2024 album Zardoya and Conway made as the first project written after their breakup, with Gianluca Buccellati producing alongside Conway. Zardoya has described the track to Billboard as "almost like, an anti-pop song," a phrase that reads almost like a dare given what it went on to do: become the band's first solo entry on the Billboard Hot 100 and, eventually, surpass "Otro Atardecer" as The Marías' biggest song by any measure.
This is the first project that we write together where we're not romantically together... it was probably the easiest project to write together.María Zardoya, NPR
The breakup didn't end the songwriting partnership. It seems to have freed it.
Breaking Up to Break Through
Zardoya and Conway have both framed the shift from a codependent couple to independent collaborators as the thing that let Submarine happen at all. The album's cover nods to Kieślowski, its song titles nod to Almodóvar, and its emotional center is a track Zardoya has separately called one of her favorites precisely because it "perfectly encapsulates what I was feeling at the time." The commercial afterlife proved that specificity travels: the song's momentum landed The Marías an opening slot on Billie Eilish's Hit Me Hard and Soft tour by December 2024, then a headline run that opened with both Coachella weekends in April 2025.
By the time UMPG announced that publishing deal, the band's résumé included two 2025 MTV VMA nominations, a Selena Gomez and benny blanco feature, and a chart profile that six months earlier belonged to a cult-favorite dream-pop act rather than a crossover name.
The Solo Turn
Zardoya used the same year to step outside the band entirely, launching the solo project Not for Radio in August 2025 and releasing the debut album Melt that October, written in roughly three weeks at a cabin in upstate New York with Sam Evian and Buccellati. "I approached Not for Radio with the goal of steering clear of pop songwriting," she told Billboard, describing music meant to be heard "lying under a tree or going on a walk" rather than through a phone speaker. It is, in effect, the opposite move from the one that made "No One Noticed" a hit: a deliberate retreat from the algorithm just as the algorithm caught up with her.
Ten Years, One Room
The arc closed, almost too neatly, at the 68th Grammy Awards in early 2026, where The Marías were nominated for Best New Artist alongside Olivia Dean, Addison Rae and Sombr. Zardoya performed "No One Noticed" on the telecast, a song about a relationship nobody outside the band was supposed to register, now sung in front of an audience of millions almost exactly ten years after the Kibitz Room. The band lost to Dean. Given where the song started, and how long it took to be heard at all, losing barely registered as the point.