TIME TO ROCK

When the pandemic botched their 2020 tour plans, the Aces faced the music and went back into the studio. The result is an indie-rock gem that’s their most personal album to date.

- NORA O’DONNELL

Tucked behind a loading dock and beyond a hidden door in Los Angeles, there's a time warp in progress. Four women, all in their mid-20s, are mugging for a camera phone while a friend records a TikTok video. It's an occurrence that could not have been technologically possible before 2016, but the result on the screen looks deceptively analog. The women are dressed in the same oversized blazers, a look reminiscent of the 1990s. (Or is it the 1960s, when the Beatles wore matching suits and played on The Ed Sullivan Show?) The location doesn't line up either. This fabulous foursome is palling around in Koreatown inside a dark bar, illuminated by the glow of old box TVs playing vintage MTV videos and snippets of Max Headroom, the supposed computer-generated TV presenter who became a pop-culture sensation during the 1980s.

But these women are not only travelers across time and space-they are also channeling their younger selves. And yet, despite all these divergent timelines, they are perfectly in sync in a way like never before.

The year is 2023, and these chrononauts are in a band called the Aces. Since they were tweens living in suburban Utah, they've been making infectious pop-rock about the trials and tribulations of young romance, a winning formula that got them signed to Red Bull Records in 2016 when they were recently out of high school. Together, sisters Cristal (lead vocals/ guitar) and Alisa Ramirez (drums), Katie Henderson (lead guitar/vocals) and McKenna Petty (bass/vocals) have released two full-length albums and amassed more than 260 million streams over the course of their career.