By Patty G.

It’s the coldest night of the year in El Paso — the kind of cold that slips under your skin and makes you reconsider leaving the house at all. So yes, it’s freezing outside. But you wouldn’t know it sitting with Traví and the Travettes.

Meeting them at Bye Bye Dear on this early Sunday night, the energy is immediate. Restless. Like if there were instruments within reach, this interview would’ve turned into a rehearsal.

There’s something full-circle about meeting in this building. The band’s first official show as Traví and the Travettes was November 9, 2018, at what was then Lowbrow Palace — before the space became Bye Bye Dear.

“Oh geez,” laughs Travis Gibson, the band’s vocalist and guitarist. “Wow, we’re old!”

However, the band’s history stretches back further than that date.

“It’s just the funnest thing I could think to do on a Saturday night,” Gibson says. “Playing, drinking some beers with the boys, having a good time being loud and annoying. It’s the best thing there is.”

Before the Travettes, there was The Glitter Tacos — a project that feels less like a former band and more like an earlier chapter in the same ongoing experiment. Members swapped instruments without ceremony. Drummers became bassists. Bassists became drummers. If you’ve followed the El Paso scene long enough, you’ve probably seen some version of this lineup under at least two different names. Three-fourths of the current band once played in The Glitter Tacos. Drummer Abraham and guitarist Isaiah Luevano are the newest additions, rounding out a lineup that feels both seasoned and freshly re-energized.

Collectively, they’ve been playing together — in some configuration or another — for nearly 20 years. Metal projects. Indie projects. Punk projects. Less a dramatic origin story, more a long-standing creative orbit that eventually settled into something louder and more self-aware.

“It’s just the funnest thing I could think to do on a Saturday night,” Gibson says. “Playing, drinking some beers with the boys, having a good time being loud and annoying. It’s the best thing there is.”

Bassist Reggie jumps in: “We’re like adult toddlers. We need our sippy cups and our beers,” he laughs. “The instruments are our toys and we’ve got all this energy and we’ve got to get it out.”

Ask them what they sound like and you won’t get a carefully rehearsed genre breakdown. You’ll get this: “A running joke we have is where Ted Nugent meets Weezer.” It tracks — big, riff-forward rock and roll with enough looseness to keep it from calcifying into something else entirely. There’s swagger, but there’s also a wink.

Their live philosophy is what they call the “Hot 20”: tight sets, no self-indulgent solos stretching into oblivion. They’d rather leave a crowd wanting one more song than test its patience with one too many.

They’ve played to packed rooms. They’ve played to three people. For Traví and the Travettes, the approach doesn’t change. “If nobody came to the shows, we’d still be playing with the same energy,” Gibson says.

For them, the live show is the artistic statement. Streaming platforms? Optional.

“I feel no pressure to do any of that. I think the basis of the band is basically live shows. I feel like what most strongly gets our artistic values across is us live, with the energy and the volume and the attitude,” Gibson says. “So, feeling the need to be on Bandcamp or Spotify has never really been a top priority of mine. Of course, it’s nice to have something people can look up. But I’d rather they just come to the shows.”

There is recorded Travettes music — sort of. An early EP went up online that eventually lapsed. The songs disappeared. The login became band lore. So the EP was re-recorded and that account also lapsed. But there is a video. In “Pabst Blue Ribbon” — one of the only remaining digital artifacts of their catalog — Gibson rides a bike through the desert, longing for his beverage of choice. (As we talk, cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon sit on the counter in front of the band, blurring the line between bit and biography.) In the video, the band, in its former lineup as a trio, joins him for cake before he wanders the desert in mock-epic thirst, stumbling upon many of his desires. He eventually discovers a can of PBR and reunites with the band to finish the song.

The video, like the band, is self-aware but never cynical. It’s good old rock and roll that doesn’t take itself too seriously — though make no mistake, they can play. Beneath the jokes are sharp instincts: hooks with grit, riffs with weight, songs that hum long after the amps cool down.

This year, they say, might be different regarding their recorded output.

“The whole time we’ve existed, we’ve been doing this for fun,” says Reggie. “This year, we’re going to take it a little more seriously and get our shit together: put new music out, get new music out and go out of town.

For years, Traví and the Travettes have stayed rooted in El Paso and Juárez. Now, they’re inching outward. In early February, they played Albuquerque for the first time — their first real step beyond the El Paso/Juárez orbit. If it clicks, they say, maybe Phoenix. Maybe Austin. Maybe Dallas.

“Take this clown show on the road,” Reggie laughs, half joking.

By the time we wrap, it’s still freezing outside. But inside the same building where they played their first show years ago, there’s laughter, overlapping stories, and the easy chemistry that only comes from years of shared volume.

They didn’t have to come out on the coldest night of the year to talk about their band. They did anyway.

And if that doesn’t tell you what kind of band Traví and the Travettes are, their next 20-minute set will.

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