The quintessential pop band of it-girls, The Aces, have 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.
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.”
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.’”
