Photo Credit: Julian Burgueño

California quartet The Aces are part of a growing group of alt-pop artists using the genre to tell compelling female-led, unapologetically queer stories (see also: Carlie Hanson and Hayley Kiyoko). On their new album, I’ve Loved You For So Long, The Aces best showcase their strength in this area on the opener “I’ve Loved You For So Long.” An airy, summer-ready synth-pop anthem, it captures a desire to recapture the spark of a relationship’s early days – and the peppy sounds suggest real belief in this being possible. In her yearning, intimate lyrics, lead singer Cristal Ramirez proves to be genuinely evocative (“Taking me back, babe, to where it all started // I’m stealing a kiss in your brand-new apartment”). 

I’ve Loved You For So Long fares best when the band captures love while it’s flourishing, not decaying – which is why it’s a shame the album spends so much longer on the latter state rather than the former. “Not The Same” is seemingly about a relationship where, despite both parties’ best efforts, irreparable damage has been done – there’s real sadness in the song’s lyrics, which capture a sense of exhaustion at trying to repair what has been broken (“we’ve tried, and we’re just not the same”). But the song simply sounds too peppy – with its washed-out drum machines and propulsive synths – to effectively communicate such feelings. 

Perhaps aware of the limitations of this sound, the band uses pop-punk stylings as their template on a number of other, angstier songs. It works on “Girls Make Me Wanna Die” – an appropriately frenetic song about desire, whose lyrics are both conversational and confessional; evoking drunken, late-night conversations in a smoking section (“I tried to tell her once on a drunken night // But it came out all f*cked, like a bad pickup line”). The sound, however, is less effective on “Suburban Blues.” Though the song is peppered with confessional, depressive, and bleakly comical lines (“Good girls love Jesus // Not that girl from Phoenix”), the pop-punk influence ends up too watered-down to compliment the song’s themes. Here, the band would do well to take cues from the snarling pop-punk of Demi Lovato’s latest release, or the melodic but ferocious music of Hole’s Celebrity Skin. 

Across the LP, there’s a sense of a band struggling to navigate conflicting desires – between the euphoric synth-pop of their peers Chvrches and the tasteful, California-pop stylings of indie icons HAIM on their latest effort, Women In Music Pt. III. Indicative of this is “Solo,” which attempts to be all things to all people and ends up resulting in beige-ness. But if I’ve Loved You For So Long feels like a transitory album – finding the quartet working out a new sound in real time – it’s one I suspect will soon lead to greater things.

Written by: Tom Williams