The quintessential pop band of it-girls, The Aces, just released their new album Gold Star Baby via SoundOn. A concept album that doesn’t take itself too seriously, Gold Star Baby is a metaphorical club in every city where if you know…you know. But everyone and anyone is invited to the best party of the summer. If their previous album is the backstory of discovering their identity, Gold Star Baby is in turn a celebration of queerness and escapist, sapphic, disco-pop fun. The largely self-produced album isn’t just an evolution for the 4-piece, but where they’ve been headed all along as they shed the weight of painful transparency and allow listeners to see them arrive liberated — Listen here.
The band shared, “When we started making ‘Gold Star Baby,’ there was one goal in mind: we just wanted to have fun. Pop melodies, pulsing four to the floor rhythm, shimmering guitars, and the funkiest bass lines we’ve written yet. It was simple. If it didn’t make us move, we wrote another song. All we wanted to do was dance.”
GOLD STAR BABY WORLD TOUR Kicks Off This Fall After Festival Performances at ALL THINGS GO NYC and DC. — SEE ALL DATES AND BUY TICKETS HERE
Opening with the narrated “Welcome to Gold Star Baby,” The Aces set up the velvet-roped sonic queue into the hottest club in town; almost a modern spin on George Clinton’s P-Funk mythology. The club’s musical guests that night? None other than The Aces, naturally.
The band begins crafting the perfect night out, even if it’s just the glitter-glossed mirage of escapism, across tracks like “Jealous,” “The Magic,” the album’s title track, and “You Got Me” for the clubgoers who start the night early and stay until the sun comes up. Then we reach the phone call that is “The Girls Interlude” where the fashionably latecomers figure out pregame plans and what they’re going to wear to Gold Star Baby to make their ex, who they’ll inevitably run into, jealous.
As we cross into the back half of the album, the flirtiness of the songs mirror the point in the night where people start pairing off with who they’ve been making eyes at since they arrived. From “She Likes Me” to “Fire in the Hole” there’s the back and forth of trying to determine if this is just a fling or something more. “Spending the Night” is full of a romanticized hesitancy but album closer “I’m Sweet (I’m Mean)” immediately bounces back in confrontational confidence. And until the next time, the music fades, the lights come up and everyone inside Gold Star Baby has to step out into the blinding sun of a new day.
The Aces perfectly sum it up with, “This album is all about joy, confidence, even cockiness, and sex appeal. We feel now that we’re grown women, we can explore those things in a way that feels authentic and exciting. This album is for anyone that’s looking for an escape in the more than challenging world we live in. This album is a celebration. Welcome to ‘Gold Star Baby.’”
The Aces also released the official video for the album’s title track. Directed by the band’s Alisa Ramirez, Gold Star Baby the club takes on a physical form, even if the details of the night are a little blurry around the edges. The video pulls inspiration from disco films like Saturday Night Fever and Thank God It’s Friday, as well as the infamous lore around Studio 54.
“This album really embodies the sound of what I think a resident disco band would play at the clubs in these films, so I thought it would be cool to create our own club through both the album and video,” shares Alisa Ramirez. “As far as the song goes, to me it feels like the epitome of a queer awakening; exciting, sexy, intense (sometimes even disorienting) and mostly, magical. I wanted to embody that feeling visually through a vibrant, colorful night out that starts off just like any other Saturday night and transforms into a psychedelic queer disco fantasy at Gold Star Baby. It’s told through the lens of a young woman who’s come to the club with her friend, but upon entering is transported to another world where her desires become her reality.”
Gold Star Baby album artwork and press photos by Dana Trippe
Source link
