Taken from this week’s Future Pop mailer. Click here to subscribe.
When you were a kid, did you form a band with your friends? Personally I was a member of innovatively-named duo the Spice Sisters (the twist was… we weren’t actually sisters… and we couldn’t sing). In 2008, four pre-teen girls in Utah formed the group The Blue Aces, and unlike the Spice Sisters, they actually had talent. They started playing gigs and in 2015 they decided to forgo college to pursue a career in music. So far it’s going pretty well. Changing their name to The Aces, they signed to Red Bull Records and have been building a following online, with millions of plays on Spotify. They played their first London gig last week and I went along to check it out. What’s unusual about The Aces is although they’re a girlband with instruments, they actually have the star quality to be a girlband without instruments. They’re very pretty and cool, and lead singer Cristal is a great performer. The only problem is that the band they sound most like is the one they’d already be most compared to: Haim. That means to succeed they’d need a song better than anything Haim has released, and although they have some really nice, catchy tunes, especially Stuck and Physical, they haven’t achieved that yet. If they can find a more distinctive, stronger sound, they have all the other ingredients needed to make it big.