Q&A: The Sexiest Interview of All With “World’s Sexiest Boyband” Mickey Darling
“WHAT’S UP SEXIES?” — Mickey Darling’s Skyler Molina and Austin Medrano never expected to see their band reach the audience it has today. When the San Antonio, TX–based duo first started making music together, they did so just for fun. After experimenting with their demos and drawing inspiration from other indie-pop musicians such as Boy Pablo and Gus Dapperton, Mickey Darling found their sound.
Now readying themselves for a three-city tour through LA, Chicago, and Brooklyn, the self-proclaimed “World’s Sexiest Boyband” is ready to bring their songs to life for fans across the country. Their tour announcement came after the release of their latest single, “SAY THAT YOU MISS ME,” a track sure to shine live on stage. Molina’s vocal styling and Medrano’s excitingly fresh instrumentals create yet another hit from the band that fans are sure to have on repeat all day long.
Mickey Darling’s notable bedroom pop sound and unique lyrics reflect not only on the creativity of the two minds behind the music but their personalities as well. As humorous and bright in their conversation as they are clever and energetic in their music, both Molina and Medrano have the spunk and character to perfectly compliment their undeniably entertaining and danceable sound. The duo has mastered such a careful art of dedicating themselves to their craft without stripping away the personality and charm at the center of their work. Their memorable discography is one sure to bring a smile upon the faces of first-time listeners and long-time fans alike.
Read below to find out more about Mickey Darling’s newest single, “SAY THAT YOU MISS ME,” their thoughts on their upcoming tour, and how Molina’s time working at a chicken restaurant inspired the naming of the band.
LUNA: Let's go back to the very beginning. When you both formed Mickey Darling in 2018, it started off as a kind of joke. Explain a bit about how this all came to be and how you started.
MOLINA: Sure. We never really had done anything together per se — we just sort of jammed a few times. He [Medrano] was in college at the time, and I was just existing in the world. I dropped out of college, I was working random oddball jobs, and I wanted to start working on music. I knew he knew how to produce music — pretty much the only person I knew that knew how to produce music to any degree. To give it context, I heard the song "Dance Baby" by Boy Pablo. I heard it on an Emma Chamberlain video or something like that, and I was like, “What is that?” It blew my mind. So then I sent it to him. I was like, “Dude, I just heard this song. I want to make music like this but I don't know how you can try, just for fun, making a song like that.” I think I said something about Gus Dapperton too, and kind of like Boy Pablo in this realm, because it was really booming with Clairo, Wallows, Gus, Boy Pablo, and Rex, of course.
And literally, it was the weirdest thing — two hours later, he was like, “Oh, I just did this. What do you think?” It ended up becoming "Shane Dawson,” which is one of our very early songs. I remember, I was in the car, I was driving, and I was like, “That was really fast.” And I listened to it and it blew my mind. I was like, “Whoa, that's cool.” So then I asked him, “Hey, can you maybe make music for me for my solo project?” So then he made the “Shia LeBeouf” instrumental, and then we worked on “Shia LeBeouf",” we finished “Shia LeBeouf,” we made the music video to “Shia LeBeouf".” We had so much fun doing the music video together that we were like, “What if we just did this together?” You know, why would it be a solo project kind of thing? Then the rest is literally history.
LUNA: Where did the name Mickey Darling come from?
MOLINA: Funny story. Whenever we started working together and we made “Shia LeBeouf,” the last job I was working was a server job at a chicken restaurant. It's a wing restaurant here in Texas, I think it's only exclusively in Texas — it's called Pluckers. It's a delicious place. I don't eat meat, sadly, anymore — I'm not carnivorous anymore (both laugh). I'll tell you about that later. I'm a vegetarian now, but it is a delicious place. Anyway, it was the opening month of the restaurant — it was a brand new staff, everyone was new. This coworker of mine walked up to me, beautiful girl, and she was like, “Hey, I don't think we've ever met before. My name is Mickey.” I don't know why but something really stood out to me in that moment. As our hands are shaking, I was like, “Mickey, I really like that name. Mickey.” And I said it like that. Thinking back on it, it's so weird that I did that. But I didn't mean it weird — I was just in awe for a second. I was like, “I really love that name. I'm going to use that as a stage name.” And she was like, “What?” It was one of those weird moments. And then a few weeks later, we were at some sort of meeting for the job and one of the CEO’s names was Taylor Darling and it really blew my mind as well — I get my mind blown very easily.
But it really, really shocked me — I never thought of a term of endearment as a last name. I have another stage name idea, which is Mikey Sweetheart, and I love that too. Just any term of endearment as a last name is so adorable to me. So I saw Taylor Darling — I thought it was so brilliant so then I wrote it in my notes for stage name ideas; I had a big list. Then finally, we're about to post “Shia LeBeouf” and become officially a band, which is weird, and I texted him [Medrano] and I said “Okay, now all we need is a stage name so we can upload this song.” I sent him a big list of random names — I remember in the list was Late Night Jog.
MEDRANO: Do you still have them?
MOLINA: I have the text, yeah. I have a screenshot of the exact text I sent. But I was like, yeah, here’s the names and it's like, Mickey... Late Night Jog...Taylor Darling... random names. And literally the first text back he just said, “What about Mickey Darling?” And I was like, I don't know how you saw that, or how that caught your eye… Like, why wouldn't you just say, “What about Taylor Darling,” right?
MEDRANO: It stuck out.
MOLINA: It felt amazing. Right when I read it, I was like, yeah. Usually I try to doubt everything, but that was it — the rest is history.
LUNA: It works well. I love that story.
MOLINA: Thank you. Yeah, I tell real long anecdotes, my bad.
LUNA: When you guys started this project about four years ago, did you expect yourselves to be where you are today?
MEDRANO: No, not at all.
MOLINA: No, no. Being here even now is just super weird, right?
MEDRANO: Yeah, it's unfathomable. I think at first it was sort of like a glimmer of hope, but it was more so for the fun of it. Something I had struggled with previously with my bands before was I could never do something I truly enjoyed. It was more settling for other people's sound. But this I felt was really fun and new for me. It was just exciting.
MOLINA: Yeah, and I think there was some sort of shift where we let go of expectation. Everyone that's pursuing music, a lot of the time, is sort of living in this need or huge desire to just get famous and get streams and get money. That stuff is awesome, but when you're just chasing it, I don't know, there's just something about it. So whenever we let go of all that [we] let [in] the whole idea of, “You know, maybe we will never get famous or maybe we'll never make money off this or be rock stars.”
MEDRANO: I guess that’s the most freeing thing.
MOLINA: Exactly — because then it took all the pressure off. I'm going to sing whatever I want to sing, I'm going to write the most raunchy lyrics or the most personal things because I have nothing to lose. I don't need to play it safe because playing it safe never got me anywhere, really. It was a very liberating time, just to be like, “We're not gonna get famous anyway, so let's just do whatever we want.” But yeah, now to be here — very surreal. We'll have those moments where, right before a show, or when we're in Mexico for a month just writing as our job, we're like, “This is weird — this is not normal.” We don't ever want to get too numb to it, you know, because as humans we adapt so quick and we get so used to everything. And it's very, very not normal to be doing anything that we're doing in a sense, and we're just honored. We're grateful for it because of the fact that we spent the first 23 or 24 years of our lives just wishing we had something similar to this. So now we're here. All those years of wishing and dreaming and working towards something sort of came to fruition, so it's pretty sick.
LUNA: That actually segues great into my next question. Why do you think music specifically serves as such a strong outlet for you to express your personalities and creativity through your work?
MEDRANO: I feel like it might be the avenue that I took, personally, to give so much time into it. It was something I could connect with, with my friends at the time, and it just stuck. Now it's something that I feel like I can't even live without. It's like I need to be using this as an outlet because there's almost no form. There are no rules to it. I don't know, it's interesting.
MOLINA: Yeah, I couldn't really quantify it either, really. That's a great line: “I can't live without it.” It's like air in a way. It's such a necessity now, but also looking back on my upbringing, I tried so many different things. Music was the last thing on my mind, in the sense of a pipe dream, right? I never thought it was possible to be a rock star, even though I wanted it with everything in me. So I experimented and I dipped my toes in anything else that I could. I was a soccer player, I was a YouTuber, I did Vine, I was a poet at some point, I tried to be an author and write books. I was doing so many different things in those formative years, but I never realized as I was changing and doing all those different things, always on the backburner was music. That was always there. It's almost like I just didn't want to believe it or see it … so I guess it was always my therapy to some degree, I just never realized it.
A few times, I had very, very, path-altering conversations with some close friends and mentors in my life. They'd be like, “Hey, dude, no offense, but have you ever just thought of doing music only?” Kind of saying, dude, your YouTube videos suck. Which they did, they were garbage, but I didn't put any effort into it — I didn't really care, right? So hearing those people say stuff like that to me as outsiders being like, “You know, maybe just redirect your whole life.” After a while, I did a lot of soul-searching and realized how to strip away my ego in a lot of ways to realize I should just try that and pursue that. Yeah, and now it's like water — it's like the water I drink.
LUNA: I totally get that. It's something that just draws you in. Even from a journalistic perspective, music is my favorite thing to write about because like you said, it's freeing. You can tell everyone has their own sound, their own personality that all comes through. So I love that. I also wanted to congratulate you both because you just released a new single, "SAY THAT YOU MISS ME.” What would you want to tell fans about that track that they might not already know?
MOLINA: Ooh, wow. That’s a great question.
MEDRANO: That might be the oldest song we’ve put out. Something we’ve been sitting on for a long time. I think I wrote that in 2020.
MOLINA: Yeah, we've had the demo for years. We have shared notes between us on our phones and we just throw any demos that we think could potentially be a Mickey song. That's always been in there, for at least two years now. It was always one of our favorites but we just didn't know how to do it. I remember I worked so hard on the verses, and I could never think of a solid melody. I just didn't like any of the melodies I was coming up with — I had a bunch of hook ideas [but] I just didn't like any. Even the one that we ended up using, the actual hook that it is now, I was so skeptical [of] that hook. It was a real challenge for us to create that one and make it fully finished.
MEDRANO: Yeah because I think our songs kind of pump out in two or three weeks. That one maybe took the longest.
MOLINA: We live in this fast-paced society where it's like, grind and grit and motivation, right? But sometimes I get real in my head if I have a song I like a lot but I'm just not feeling it. Whenever you have to make the decision to put it away and work on something else, that's very hard to do. Sometimes it can psychologically mess you up, where you're like, “Oh, am I just giving up? Do I not have the grit to keep working on that song, even though I'm not feeling it?” And I guess that was a very cool thing that we learned from that, that I would never even have thought of. It would have obviously been a very different song had we actually tried to finish it a year ago or two years ago, so I'm glad we waited on it. Also we're just so different now. We have more capacity and more experience and wisdom and all that good stuff to finish the song how it should have been finished, instead of just rushing.
MEDRANO: Yeah, that’s interesting because now it has, maybe in a sense, its greatest potential since we waited. Had we released it earlier it would have been way different.
LUNA: That’s awesome. You’re also going on tour next month, which is very exciting. What are you looking forward to most?
MOLINA: I mean, I don't even know, dude. It's very exciting. We've only pretty much played Texas shows and we've played maybe two or three LA shows — most of them were house shows, like backyard shows kind of thing. So obviously very excited to see the fans and the different people that also listen to us but just in a whole different area code, a different part of the US — that’s very exciting. I don't even know what to expect, so I don't even know what I'm excited about necessarily.
MEDRANO: This is a first.
MOLINA: It's like a mystery, yeah. I'm excited that it's bite-sized — it's not big, over-demanding. When these bands that are our size announce a 60-show tour, I literally want to cry. I'm like, that sounds awful — doesn't sound fun. Obviously, being a rock star is cool. You get to tour and you get to meet a bunch of people and play shows and make money — it's so cool, right? No, that just sounds exhausting. But of course, to each his own, I guess. I'm excited because it's just so bite-sized and it's digestible. We can sort of dip our toes in the whole experience of it but it's nothing too crazy — but super exciting. It's also super fun to finally give them what they want. We get endless DMs about shows and tours and stuff and it's so nice to finally be like, “Here, we finally reciprocated.” So that's super sick. And to play the new songs too. I'm super excited for that. We're gonna be in New York for a few days, just to hang out in New York — that's gonna be super exciting. Chicago.
MEDRANO: I’ve never been.
MOLINA: It’s gonna be fun, it’s gonna be fun. It’s a cool city.
LUNA: Is there a song you’re most excited to perform live?
MEDRANO: I feel like “FIND OUT THE HARD WAY.” I mean, that song's crazy but so good.
MOLINA: Yeah, because the only songs that we've never performed live so far are “FIND OUT THE HARD WAY” and “SAY THAT YOU MISS ME.” We played “RIGHT WHEN YOU LEFT” once at our last show.
MEDRANO: That was really fun, too.
MOLINA: That was really fun. I guess now because “SAY THAT YOU MISS ME” just came out, I'd probably say “SAY THAT YOU MISS ME.” It's fresh to them and to us, you know? So it's this really, really infant-stage experience for all of the parties.
MEDRANO: Yeah, that’s funny.
LUNA: If you could describe Mickey Darling in three words other than “World's Sexiest Boyband,” what would they be?
MEDRANO: Definitely energetic, raunchy, and young, in a way.
MOLINA: Those are really good. I think “relatable” comes to mind. I see a lot of DMs that we get of people just being like, “You're singing exactly what I'm feeling or going through.” It's so weird because I never think about that. I'm just going through normal, relatable stuff like other humans do, right? So I think relatable, goofy, and I'll say carefree. I was gonna say careless, but we do care about this stuff — we don't ever want to care too much in an overthinking sense. Does that make sense? So in the music and in the lyrics, and in our life, we live a very carefree sort of mentality, where it's like, “Hey dude, I know that there's hundreds of thousands of people watching us now and paying attention and listening, but let's not let it ruin us.” We have to sort of take a step back and be like, “It's just us in your dorm working on ‘Shia Lebeouf’ still, right?” It's just just two dudes making some goofy music. That's kind of how we have to keep it if we want to not lose our minds over the concept of there's always going to be judgment on any little thing. So I think carefree is a good word.
MEDRANO: At least give them something to judge that we love.
MOLINA: Yes. Yeah, exactly.
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