The Aces are currently on the road for the first time since the pandemic started and have been playing to sold out crowds across the country. The highly anticipated tour has finally given fans a chance to see the band perform songs from their latest album, ‘Under My Influence’ that was released mid-2020. Having debuted across numerous Billboard Charts, hitting #53 on Top Albums, #31 for Emerging Artists, and #18 on Heatseekers Albums, ‘Under My Influence’ garnered much praise for its exploration of love, relationships, mental health, religion, and sexuality, with several band members owning their identities as queer women and using gender pronouns in their music for the first time. The deluxe version was released in October this year and features previously unreleased tracks “Sleepy Eyes” and “Aren’t You,” as well as remixes from Snakehips and Fickle Friends, in addition to a brand-new remix of “Daydream” from GRAMMY Award-winning rock band Portugal The Man. Just like other artists, the band had to grapple with ever-evolving aspects of not being able to tour and promote the album, as lead singer and vocalist, Cristal Ramirez stated, “we started 2020 like you know going at like 100 miles per hour we’re like at all these different events we’ve never been to and uh we were making music videos and we were you know kind of like setting up 2020 to be this year that was supposed to be like massive for us. All of that was just kind of washed away so there was a lot of like reconciling with that and dealing with the emotions that that brought out because we felt like we put our whole souls into this music that was about to come out.” The silver lining from the situation has come as the band re-focused and started creating new music that the band describes as “more playful and childlike”.
The Aces spoke with B-Sides host Pete Mar to catch up with the band and how they’ve feeling being back in front of audiences again, how three of the members felt turning 25 years old, highlights from the last year and more.
