María Zardoya is a Puerto Rico-born, Georgia-raised singer and songwriter best known as the frontwoman of The Marías, the bilingual Los Angeles band she co-founded in 2016, and, since 2025, as the artist behind the solo project Not for Radio. Across nearly a decade she has moved The Marías from LA club bills to a 2026 Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, largely on the strength of the slow-building, then suddenly viral, 2024 single "No One Noticed."
Zardoya was born in Puerto Rico and moved as a child to Snellville, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, where she was raised. Fan-aggregator sites commonly cite November 21, 1994 as her date of birth, while an earlier, far less corroborated Spanish-language Wikipedia draft lists December 17, 1991; neither English Wikipedia nor the band's own materials publish a confirmed birth date, so the specific figure is best treated as approximate rather than settled.
Her father taught her guitar as a child, and she began writing songs first in Spanish and then in English, idolizing Selena and singing in her high school choir. She has described her upbringing as a study in duality: "too Latin" for parts of life in Georgia, yet not quite fitting the mold on regular childhood trips home to Puerto Rico. "The first song I ever wrote was in Spanish and the second song was in English," she told Grammy.com. "Growing up in the states in Georgia but also embracing the culture at home and going back to Puerto Rico a few times a year, it's just this duality I've been living my entire life." TIME included her on its 2024 Latino Leaders list, writing that she "feels like she's existed between two worlds almost all her life." She has spoken with pride about her island roots in the context of Bad Bunny's 2025 Super Bowl halftime show, saying, "I'm really proud to know him, to collaborate with him, and to be from the little island of Puerto Rico."
After finishing high school in Georgia, Zardoya moved to Los Angeles to pursue music, a trip she has said was partly funded by Halloween costume contest winnings and made on a drive from Atlanta in under two days. Before The Marías, she performed solo under the name Zara Sky starting around 2011, releasing one early project that has since become largely unavailable, and retiring the alias in 2016 in favor of a band.
The pivotal meeting happened in 2016 at the Kibitz Room, the small bar and music venue attached to the legendary Canter's Deli in Los Angeles. Zardoya was performing on the bill; drummer Josh Conway was running sound for the first time in his life. "Once in LA, I was trying to play anywhere that would let me," Zardoya recounted. "One of those venues was the Kibitz Room right next to the legendary Canter's Deli. Josh was running sound that night, and that's where we met." She has told Vogue that the two knew immediately they had chemistry, "both personally and creatively." They began writing together almost at once, started dating shortly after, and recruited friends Jesse Perlman on guitar and Edward James on keys to round out a live lineup.
James suggested naming the group The Marías after Zardoya's own name, an idea she initially resisted. "At first, I didn't like it because I didn't want anything with my name in it, but I had no alternatives, so we went with it," she told Hypebae. The band's earliest opportunity came from an aborted deal to write songs for television; when those plans fell through, the group repurposed the material into its debut EP. Their first single, "I Don't Know You," arrived in late 2017.
The Marías released the debut EP Superclean, Vol. I on November 3, 2017, followed by Superclean, Vol. II on September 28, 2018, establishing the band's dreamy, film-referencing sound on the LA club circuit. In early 2021 the group signed to Atlantic Records, distributed jointly through Nice Life Recording Company, the label and publishing venture founded by producer Ricky Reed, ahead of their debut studio album.
CINEMA arrived June 25, 2021, written and produced by Zardoya and Conway largely in their LA apartment. The lead single "Hush" hit No. 1 at Adult Alternative radio, and the album earned a Grammy nomination for Best Engineered Album, with Conway individually recognized for the credit. The band described CINEMA as an explicit homage to the movies that shaped them, with Zardoya calling each song "its own individual scene in its own individual world." Vogue described the record as "a flurry of magnetizing tracks with redolent lyrics balanced out by melodies that meld jazz, funk, and electro-lounge," while the Los Angeles Times praised "complicated grooves that hint at soul music and Latin jazz" beneath Zardoya's "hushed murmur that invites the listener to lean in."
The CINEMA era produced a run of milestones that established the band well beyond LA: a January-to-February 2022 U.S. headline tour that opened at Brooklyn Bowl in Las Vegas, included two sold-out nights at Brooklyn Steel in Williamsburg, and closed with hometown Los Angeles shows; performances on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and The Kelly Clarkson Show; and a standout April 2022 set at Coachella named to Rolling Stone, Billboard and LA Times year-end lists of the festival's best moments. That same May, Bad Bunny featured the band on "Otro Atardecer" from Un Verano Sin Ti, the only indie-pop track on an album that went on to become the first all-Spanish-language record nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammys. Zardoya later performed the song live alongside Bad Bunny in front of stadium crowds as large as 80,000.
In 2023 the band deepened its ties to Latin and reggaeton-adjacent circles with "Si Me Voy," featuring Cuco, and "Mañana," with Tainy and Young Miko. That year also brought two sold-out shows on the lawn of Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, a performance Zardoya has cited as one of her defining live-show memories.
Submarine, released May 31, 2024, was the band's second studio album and the first written after Zardoya and Conway's romantic breakup, produced by Gianluca Buccellati alongside Conway. Its cover art nods to Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours: Blue, and several song titles reference the films of Pedro Almodóvar. Zardoya told NPR the shift away from a romantic partnership changed the writing process for the better: "This is the first project that we write together where we're not romantically together... it was probably the easiest project to write together." She and Conway both described the change as a move from a codependent dynamic toward individual creative lives, which she said "ultimately led to more creativity."
The album's centerpiece, "No One Noticed," became a slow-burn phenomenon: it spread on TikTok through late 2024 and became the band's first solo entry on the Billboard Hot 100, eventually surpassing "Otro Atardecer" as the group's biggest song. Zardoya has called it "almost like, an anti-pop song" in conversation with Billboard, and has separately named it one of her favorite Submarine tracks because it "perfectly encapsulates what I was feeling at the time" of the split with Conway. The song's momentum led directly to The Marías being tapped as an opening act on Billie Eilish's Hit Me Hard and Soft tour beginning in December 2024, with dates including Vancouver, Seattle, Portland and San Jose, continuing into 2025 with additional stops including Los Angeles.
In April 2025 the band launched its own headline run, the Submarine Tour, kicking off with both weekends at Coachella alongside support acts julie and Momma; the Los Angeles Times named the group among Coachella 2025's must-see Latino acts. That same year Selena Gomez and benny blanco recruited The Marías for "Ojos Tristes," a bilingual reinterpretation of a 1980s Jeanette ballad, on Gomez's album I Said I Love You First.
Zardoya announced her debut solo project under the name Not for Radio on August 20, 2025. The debut album, Melt, followed on October 10, 2025, and peaked at No. 13 on the Billboard 200. The record was written in roughly three weeks during a winter stay in a cabin in upstate New York, in collaboration with Sam Evian and Gianluca Buccellati, and was deliberately built against pop convention. "I approached Not for Radio with the goal of steering clear of pop songwriting," Zardoya told Billboard, adding of her intent for how listeners would experience it: "It's a project with songs that I want people to experience the way that I love experiencing music, out in nature, lying under a tree or going on a walk." Vogue described the project as "Lush, Moody, a Little Dark, and Utterly Her Own."
Melt runs ten tracks and 42 minutes: "Puddles," "My Turn," "Moment," "Back To You," "Swan," "Not the Only One," "Magnet," "Vueltas," "Water On Your Nose" and "Slip," released under Zardoya's own Not for Radio LLC via exclusive license to Atlantic and Nice Life. The album's recurring weather and nature imagery, in titles like "Puddles," "Swan" and "Slip," has been read as a reflection of the isolated writing period behind it. In November 2025 the project embarked on a small tour that Zardoya has said paid homage to Swan Lake in its staging. A three-track EP, Bloom, followed in April 2026, its vinyl edition including a live recording of "Comet" and a solo rendition of The Marías' own "No One Noticed."
The Marías remain signed to Atlantic Records and distributed through Nice Life Recording Company, the arrangement in place since the 2021 signing ahead of CINEMA. The band is managed by Jonathan Eshak of Mick Management, who began working with the group between its two albums and is credited with expanding its touring footprint beyond the coasts. "They could play pretty large rooms, not just in New York or L.A., but in markets that are a little less traveled," Eshak told Billboard. "A big mission statement from María, Josh, Jesse and Eddie was they didn't want to be viewed as just a domestic act."
On October 17, 2025, the band signed an exclusive global publishing agreement with Universal Music Publishing Group. UMPG's announcement cited more than two billion cumulative streams, two acclaimed albums, a Top 20 Billboard 200 single, two 2025 MTV VMA nominations and six songs that had charted on Spotify's Global 200. "We're thrilled to sign with Jen and Ana Rosa at Universal Music Publishing," Zardoya said. "Having spent some time with them alongside Jody Gerson, we trust they're the perfect partners to guide us through the next phase of our collective and individual writing career(s)." UMPG executives Jennifer Knoepfle and Ana Rosa Santiago praised the band's vision as "clear and singular."
Zardoya and Josh Conway were a couple for seven years, from shortly after their 2016 meeting through the period following CINEMA's 2021 release. "Josh, The Marías' producer and drummer, and I were in a relationship for seven years," she told Into The Gloss. "We ended the romantic part of our relationship after our first album, and that threw us into a different state of consciousness where we could rediscover who we were in a new dynamic." Both have described the transition from what they called a codependent dynamic to individual lives as ultimately good for the band's music, and they continue to write and perform together as The Marías.
Media coverage has at times linked Zardoya to Jesse Rutherford, frontman of The Neighbourhood, prior to his widely reported relationship with Billie Eilish, though no interview or first-party statement from either artist directly documents that relationship, and it is best treated as background discourse rather than settled fact. What is documented is that The Marías and The Neighbourhood's professional circles overlapped for years, including a 2018 collaboration on "Hell or High Water." In November 2022, Zardoya publicly accused The Neighbourhood's then-drummer Brandon Fried of groping her at a bar, writing on Instagram: "i was at a bar last night, and i was groped under the table by brandon fried... It was one of the most uncomfortable things i've ever experienced." The Neighbourhood removed Fried from the band within a day, and he acknowledged the conduct, citing alcoholism. The band's own public statements have attributed its subsequent hiatus to burnout and life outside the group rather than to this episode specifically.
Away from the band, Zardoya has described herself as "the biggest scaredy cat," avoiding frightening media despite The Marías' own haunted, moody aesthetic, and gravitating instead toward "very wholesome" shows like The Great British Baking Show and Sex and the City. She has named Pedro Almodóvar's films, Bad Bunny's music, Lord of the Rings, Broadcast, Hope Sandoval's solo work and Thom Yorke among her creative touchstones, and describes her core artistic instinct as being an "obsessive builder of worlds." She has been separately cited as an influence by rising acts in the same bilingual, dream-pop lane, including Ella Boh, who has named The Marías among her own musical ones-to-watch.
Zardoya sums up The Marías' aesthetic in a word: "Dreamy. We've always tried creating dreamworlds in our music and through our visuals. We want people to come to us as an escape." That cinematic sensibility runs from CINEMA's film-homage concept through Submarine's Kieślowski and Almodóvar references, and genre tags across coverage span dream pop, psychedelic soul, indie pop, alternative pop and synth-pop, reflecting a deliberately blended, bilingual, retro-tinged sound.
Her personal red-carpet style leans vintage-glam with a gothic edge. At the 2025 VMAs she wore custom Valentino by Alessandro Michele from the "Le Metà Theatre des Intimités" collection, describing the look as a "1950s Art Deco gothic bride" blending velvet, lace and silk. At the 2026 Grammys she wore Alexander McQueen, part of a personal style V Magazine described as blurring "melancholy with seduction."
The Marías received two 2025 MTV VMA nominations, for Best New Artist and Best Alternative. In the 2025 Latin Grammy and Grammy cycles the band registered alongside a broader wave of crossover Latin-pop nominees that year, including Bad Bunny and Karol G. At the 68th Annual Grammy Awards in early 2026, The Marías were nominated for Best New Artist alongside Olivia Dean, KATSEYE, Addison Rae, sombr, Leon Thomas, Alex Warren and Lola Young, performing "No One Noticed" at the ceremony before losing to Olivia Dean. The nomination arrived almost exactly a decade after Zardoya and Conway's first meeting at the Kibitz Room, prompting widespread "ten years in the making" framing of the band's breakout. The Marías also registered on the American Music Awards' radar during the Submarine era with 2025 nominations, though they did not place among winners in the New Artist of the Year category at the 2026 ceremony, which went to KATSEYE.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2011 | Zardoya begins performing solo as Zara Sky. |
| 2016 | Meets Josh Conway at the Kibitz Room next to Canter's Deli in Los Angeles; The Marías form with Jesse Perlman and Edward James. |
| 2017 | Debut single "I Don't Know You"; debut EP Superclean, Vol. I released November 3. |
| 2018 | Superclean, Vol. II released; collaboration with The Neighbourhood on "Hell or High Water." |
| 2021 | Band signs to Atlantic Records / Nice Life; debut album CINEMA released June 25; "Hush" hits No. 1 Adult Alternative; Grammy nomination for Best Engineered Album. |
| 2022 | Sold-out Brooklyn Steel shows and standout Coachella set; feature on Bad Bunny's "Otro Atardecer"; Zardoya accuses The Neighbourhood's Brandon Fried of groping her, and he is removed from the band. |
| 2023 | Collaborations with Cuco and with Tainy and Young Miko; sold-out Hollywood Forever Cemetery shows. |
| 2024 | Second album Submarine released May 31; "No One Noticed" goes viral and becomes the band's first solo Hot 100 entry; band opens for Billie Eilish's Hit Me Hard and Soft tour. |
| 2025 | "Ojos Tristes" with Selena Gomez and benny blanco; Submarine Tour launches at Coachella; two 2025 VMA nominations; announces Not for Radio and releases debut solo album Melt (No. 13, Billboard 200); signs global publishing deal with UMPG. |
| 2026 | The Marías nominated for Best New Artist at the 68th Grammy Awards; Not for Radio releases the Bloom EP in April. |
No confirmed first-party birth date has been published. Fan-aggregator sites most commonly cite November 21, 1994, while a separate, less-corroborated source lists December 17, 1991; neither English Wikipedia nor the band's official materials publish an exact date.
Not for Radio is Zardoya's solo project, launched in August 2025. Its debut album, Melt, was written in about three weeks in an upstate New York cabin with Sam Evian and Gianluca Buccellati and reached No. 13 on the Billboard 200; a follow-up EP, Bloom, arrived in April 2026.
They were a couple for seven years, dating from shortly after their 2016 meeting through the period after CINEMA's 2021 release, when they ended the romantic side of their relationship while continuing to write, record and perform together in The Marías.
In November 2022, Zardoya publicly accused Brandon Fried, then the drummer of The Neighbourhood, of groping her at a bar. The band removed him within a day, and he acknowledged the conduct, citing alcoholism.
The Marías were nominated for Best New Artist at the 68th Annual Grammy Awards in early 2026 and performed "No One Noticed" at the ceremony, but the award went to Olivia Dean.
The Marías reported more than 35 million monthly Spotify listeners at the height of their 2024 to 2025 breakout, driven substantially by the viral TikTok spread of "No One Noticed." The band's catalog has surpassed two billion cumulative streams as of its October 2025 UMPG publishing deal, per that agreement's announcement. Critics have consistently framed the band's sound as cinematic and lush, with Vogue citing melodies that "meld jazz, funk, and electro-lounge" and the Los Angeles Times highlighting "complicated grooves that hint at soul music and Latin jazz." Active fan communities, including a dedicated Reddit forum, track the band's tour setlists and press coverage closely, and the band's Instagram draws cross-follows from artists including Mon Laferte, Wallows, Tim Burton, Olivia Dean, Faye Webster, Kali Uchis, sombr and Girl in Red.
| Metric | Figure | As of |
|---|---|---|
| Cumulative career streams (The Marías) | 2 billion+ | October 2025 |
| Monthly Spotify listeners (peak) | 35 million+ | 2024–2025 breakout |
| Melt peak position | No. 13, Billboard 200 | October 2025 |
| X (Twitter) followers, @themarias | approx. 146,200 | as researched |
| Release | Type | Year | Label | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Superclean, Vol. I | EP | 2017 | Independent | Debut EP, six tracks; grew out of a scrapped TV-scoring deal. |
| Superclean, Vol. II | EP | 2018 | Independent | Follow-up EP. |
| CINEMA | Studio album | 2021 | Atlantic / Nice Life | Debut LP; "Hush" hit No. 1 Adult Alternative; Grammy-nominated for Best Engineered Album. |
| Submarine | Studio album | 2024 | Atlantic / Nice Life | First post-breakup album; includes viral hit "No One Noticed." |
| "Back To Me" / "Nobody New" | Singles | 2025 | Atlantic / Nice Life | Surprise double release ahead of 2025 VMA nominations. |
| Melt (as Not for Radio) | Solo studio album | 2025 | Atlantic / Nice Life (Not for Radio LLC) | Debut solo album; peaked at No. 13, Billboard 200. |
| Bloom (as Not for Radio) | Solo EP | 2026 | Atlantic / Nice Life | Three tracks; vinyl includes live "Comet" and a solo cover of "No One Noticed." |
María Zardoya's story runs through the same LA scene that produced The Neighbourhood and Jesse Rutherford, and her influence surfaces in interviews with younger bilingual and dream-pop-leaning artists such as Ella Boh. Readers interested in the broader dark-pop and dream-pop visual language that surrounds acts like The Marías may also find context in coverage of monochrome and moody aesthetic branding elsewhere on this wiki.