The Aces: US pop band comes of age after a reckoning with Mormonism

Tucked into the corner of the BBC's Maida Vale studios, The Aces are receiving a pep talk.

"When the red light goes on, we're recording," the studio engineer tells the band. "We'll do a couple of passes of each song. You'll know in your heart when it's good."

"We try to be good first time," smiles singer Cristal Ramirez.

The US quartet are recording their first ever session for BBC Radio 1, who've made their single, Always Get This Way, the station's tune of the week.

There are a couple of false starts: A drum sample isn't firing and an autotune effect is misbehaving. Guitarist Katie Henderson commandeers a laptop from their sound engineer, swipes through two dozen menus and recalibrates the backing track.

"Autotune's hella scary when it goes wrong," she observes.

But once they rip into their three-song set, there's no stopping them. Even when Cristal "chokes on my own spit" during the final chorus of Always Get This Way.

Spirits are justifiably high: A couple of hours ago, they released their third album, I've Loved You For So Long, and the reviews are trickling in.

"Seven out of 10 from The Line Of Best Fit," announces their PR. "Eight out of 10 from Clash."

This prompts a brief, animated discussion about how publications arrive at their scores; and whether a seven is positive or merely average.

"In the end, I don't really care about reviews," concludes Cristal. "But I want a 10."

The release couldn't be any more different to their last record, Under My Influence, which dropped a couple of weeks into the first lockdown in 2020.

At the time, the band were still confident they'd get to play those songs live when summer rolled around.

"We really were in denial for a while," laughs bassist McKenna Petty. "We thought it would all be over soon."

Instead, their plans were ripped out of their hands. The album was left in limbo. The pressure to build on the buzz surrounding their debut vanished, leaving bigger questions about their future.

"We were kind of mourning our career, not sure how that was gonna go," says Alisa Ramirez, the band's drummer and Cristal's younger sister. "We went into a really dark place."

Cristal started having panic attacks, knocking on her sister's door every night at 3am. Alisa would try to comfort her, making her oatmeal and talking her back to sleep.

But her anxiety had deeper roots than the pandemic.

All four Aces were brought up in Provo, a deeply religious town in the US state of Utah, about 45 minutes away from the headquarters of the Mormon church.

"If you're not familiar with Mormonism, it's just intense Christianity, really," says Cristal. "But it's a way of life in Utah. It's the world you live in. We didn't know people that weren't Mormon in high school."

The sisters, who were "tomboys from the time we were little kids", were "constantly reminded we don't fit in," says Alisa.

"The culture is super homophobic, super patriarchal," agrees McKenna. "There's a blueprint you're supposed to follow, as women especially, of getting married young, having a family, not having a career.

"Just for some context, Utah has the highest suicide rate among LGBTQ youth in the whole country. So it's a really big issue, how they isolate queer youth, especially."

Cristal had her first crush on another girl in kindergarten but she squashed her feelings, believing they were sinful. She tried praying to be straight and dated boys in high school before coming out to her sister at the age of 18.

Alisa didn't bat an eyelid before replying, "Oh, same."

As soon as they could, they disavowed Mormonism and fled Utah for Los Angeles. But though their bandmates supported them, they were still tied to the church.

So when, in 2016. the sisters presented the band with a song called Loving Is Bible - a "grand declaration" that God is tolerant of all sexualities - it caused a certain amount of internal friction.

"That song almost didn't come out because it was really upsetting to Kenna and Katie," says Alisa.

"The church conditions you to be scared because your salvation is on the line," McKenna explains. "I was really scared of what other people would think."

Five years later, things have changed. Katie has also come out as queer and left the church. McKenna, the band's only straight member, also stepped away from Mormonism despite getting married in the LDS Temple in 2019.

"I really didn't have a good experience there [at the temple]. That was kind of the catalyst of me leaving.

"But my biggest issue was when the girls came out to me. I was like, 'This feels real and what the church is teaching doesn't. There's something wrong with the church.'"

I've Loved You For So Long is the first album The Aces have recorded where they're all on the same page. But it was only possible after the solitude of the pandemic forced them to confront their past.

"As sisters, it started clicking that we'd spent the last six years running away from our hometown and trying to not be associated with our upbringing," says Alisa.

"We were ashamed about it and embarrassed about it. It deeply affected our mental state and and it's still affecting us to this day."

At first, Cristal was reluctant to share those feelings in her lyrics.

"I was like, 'I don't want to talk about that'. I want to go to studio and not talk about it because that's my whole existence, all the time, and it's miserable."

The breakthrough came when they were working on, of all things, a sexually-charged pop song about lust at first sight. Originally called Don't Speak, Alisa texted her sister, suggesting she change the lyrics to "don't freak" and making it about her panic attacks.

"I was like, 'Wait, that's actually really cool'," says the 27-year-old. "And it opened up these big conversations about mental health and anxiety and identity."

Don't Freak came out as a standalone single in 2021, but its confessional approach reverberates throughout The Aces' new album.

"Everything I love / I'm told I shouldn't touch / Cause good girls love Jesus / Not that girl from Phoenix," sings Cristal, reliving her childhood with justifiable anger on the punky Suburban Blues.

I Always Get This Way was written as Cristal's mental health unravelled, addressing her guilt at "falling apart", and the way it affects her relationships.

But the album ends with the gorgeously catchy jangle-pop of Younger, where the singer tells her 14-year-old self: "I wouldn't change anything."

"When I was 14, I was in so much pain about my identity, about what my life was going to look like, but all I needed was someone to say 'You're okay and you're gonna figure it out'," she says.

United by their experiences, the band tear into their new songs with a fresh musical ferocity.

The spiky guitars on Girls Make Me Wanna Die are a direct callback to their beginnings, playing Paramore covers in a neighbour's garage before they were even teenagers. Other tracks draw on The Cure and Depeche Mode, who they'd hear around the house growing up.

Katie, the most reserved in conversation, is the band's musical backbone, playing funky, staccato guitar riffs on the poppy title track, and shimmering shoegazy lines on the more introspective Person.

"That's really what elevated our band, was when we added Katie," says McKenna. "That's when everything got better."

"It's just so cool to watch her chase sounds, chase tones," agrees Cristal. "She's such an amazing musician that we're always just like, 'Yeah, let's throw solo in there. She'll make the song better.'"

Unsure how to handle the praise, Katie whispers to herself: "What is even happening?"

That camaraderie, that mutual love, is what makes The Aces unique.

Most bands push their lead singer to the foreground, and Cristal could certainly dominate if she wanted to, but The Aces are a gang.

At Maida Vale, they move as a pack, trading goofy jokes and dancing to their own songs, having previously forced their Uber driver to play the new album at full blast on the way over. ("We'd better get a five-star passenger rating," laughs Cristal).

"It's scary to think where I'd be without this band," says Alisa.

"What brought us together was that intrinsic feeling of not belonging, and wanting to create something where we could hang out together and feel like we did belong."

"It's just been this incredible support system for our entire lives," agrees her sister.

"People ask us, 'How did you not break up?' and, to me, that's the craziest question because it didn't even feel like an option.

"It was just like, 'We are The Aces. We were born to do this.'"