Local artists have begun defining the music scene in El Paso with the support of college students, with venues like the Lowbrow Palace being at a walking distance from the UTEP campus. Discovering local bands has become a popular hobby for some UTEP students.
Fallex, whose name means “Fall Exercise” from an old North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) command post, is a pop-rock indie band from El Paso comprised of UTEP students. The band consists of bass guitarist Gilberto Terrazas, vocalist and guitarist Brian Ramirez, drummer Oscar Morales and guitarist Zeke Contreras, who first met each other in elementary school and continued their friendship through high school.
The band began playing in 2012. Fast forward to 2020, it has now released its latest EP titled “Rose Gold.” Five electronic indie songs create the band’s second studio album, following its 2018 “Space” album release, but the artists say they are still trying to find what sounds best.
“We’re still finding the sound that we want and what the people want. Once we see what works for the audience, we’ll probably stick to that,” Contreras said. “We’re very open to new approaches.”
As of now, the band has over 30k streams on Spotify with singles like “The Outpost,” “1967,” and “Fake,” being their most popular songs.
In the writing process, Ramirez is typically the one who comes up with a riff or a melody, then everyone else writes their own pieces to build on ideas of what they think would sound best.
According to Fallex, Ramirez wrote most of the lyrics for the album “Space,” but everyone was involved in the writing process for “Rose Gold.”
“It really does take a lot of time writing a new song,” Terrazas said. “We try to make it a commercially successful sound, but we really do dedicate a lot of time in what the song is going to say.”
Although “Rose Gold” was released on Aug. 7, 2020, while the COVID-19 pandemic continued, Fallex had been working on this project for the past two years
“We had finished all the recordings a year ago,” Ramirez said. “The thing that quarantine did stop was all the shows and promotions we had planned.”
As the band continues to write and engage with its audience online, it looks forward to the future and what its limitless sound has in store.
Alberto Silva may be reached at [email protected]; @albertosilva_f
