The Aces Have Stopped Looking Back. Dallas Gets the New Version in November.
The Aces have spent most of the last decade getting very good at being The Aces. What has changed recently is that they seem considerably less interested in what anybody else thinks that should mean.
– JAMBALOO EDITORIAL TEAM • PHOTO BY SARAH PETER
Last year’s Gold Star Baby pushed the Utah four-piece firmly toward disco-pop, trading some of the heavier introspection of 2023’s I’ve Loved You For So Long for something brighter, stranger and considerably more interested in having a good time. The largely self-produced record became the band’s fourth album, and its expanded After Hours edition arrived this spring with “Square One,” “Can’t Wait” and Katie Henderson’s remix of “The Magic.”
They haven’t stopped moving since. New single “Mesmerized” arrived in June, alongside a North American arena run supporting Louis Tomlinson that brought them through Dickies Arena in Fort Worth. Five months later, they’re coming back to DFW on their own terms and into the considerably closer quarters of Trees.
That room should suit this version of The Aces particularly well. Cristal Ramirez, Alisa Ramirez, Katie Henderson and McKenna Petty have always written pop songs with actual band mechanics underneath them, but Gold Star Baby gives those songs more room to move: basslines pushed forward, guitars used as punctuation and choruses built with the expectation that somebody is going to dance to them.
It also means the old songs have somewhere slightly different to live now. “Daydream,” “Volcanic Love,” “Girls Make Me Wanna Die” and “Always Get This Way” can sit alongside the newer material without the show becoming a neat chronological tour through four records. Recent sets have been pulling from all of it.
Gatlin opens the night, arriving with her own particularly good reason to get there early. Her debut album The Eldest Daughter came out in 2025, followed by a deluxe edition and the Pipe Dream EP this year, turning family, identity and the messier parts of growing into yourself into sharply written indie-pop.
