By Patty G.

Dirt City EP was started to highlight the cool people and creative energy of the people of El Paso and the border — music, art, film, whatever strikes our fancy.

Every now and then, though, we make an exception. This is one of those moments. And Austin-based Gus Baldwin and The Sketch is worth it.

I first saw the band — Baldwin (guitar, vocals), David Rawlinson (guitar), Lucas Martins (bass) and Trey Gutierrez (drums) — playing at Mona Bar of Modern Art in downtown El Paso in 2024. It was a set that felt like something I hadn’t seen in a while. They were loud and impossible to ignore. With their garage-punk-psych brand of rock and roll, Baldwin and his band brought a kind of chaotic energy that stuck with you. As he sings, he bounces around in a fit of uncontrollable energy. The band matches him — tight, frantic and just on the edge of falling apart.

For all that onstage energy, Baldwin will tell you he never really set out to be a frontman. “I really just wanted to be a drummer or a rhythm guitarist or bass player,” he says while on a work break during a telephone interview from Austin. “I was never good at singing growing up or hadn’t figured out how to use my voice yet.”

And yet, here he is. Baldwin might be one of the hardest-working little dudes in rock right now. He’s got The Sketch. Solo material. He DJs (a self-described record nerd). He works as a tech for psych rock band The Black Angels. He’s a stage manager at Hotel Vegas in Austin. He’s a poster designer. And he’s wrapping up a spell of shows at SXSW — 10 shows in as many days — and is heading straight into a 21-date West Coast tour that kicks off in El Paso on April 9 at Rosewood Bar.

The band recently won Best Rock Band in the 2026 Austin Music Awards (hosted by the Austin Chronicle), beating out bands like Die Spitz, who opened for The Strokes in El Paso last year.

Like a lot of bands, The Sketch came together after members rotated in time or another in Baldwin’s former band, Acid Carousel, and other bands from the DFW area, where he’s originally from. The members had bonded over garage rock musicians like Ty Segall, Bass Drum of Death and Jay Reatard. At the time, though, Baldwin had relocated to Austin and wasn’t even in a band for the first time since he was 11 years old — and it threw him into a bit of an identity crisis.

But he had songs leftover from his time in Acid Carousel. He just needed other people to help him play them. That opportunity came through a cover set with Rawlinson and Martins at a New Year’s Eve gig at Hotel Vegas. He asked drummer Trey Gutierrez to play, but he didn’t want to, so he asked another person to play drums. When that didn’t pan out, Gutierrez joined them. What started as a one-off quickly became something more.

“We kind of gelled in a way that we got really comfortable playing with each other; the songs that I was bringing in, they were adding cooler parts,” he says.

“Instead of coming into practice with the demo that I made and teaching them the parts that I had written, they just started showing up with ‘here’s the riff and the melody and stuff,’ and then we just started fleshing out the arrangements together and everyone came up with their own part.”

That naturalness was something Baldwin wanted to capture. While working an Osees show at Hotel Vegas, Baldwin struck up a conversation with keyboardist Tomas Dolas, who runs an analog recording studio, Studio 22, in Los Angeles. He was so jazzed about the studio, he wanted to record there. During a tour, the band found themselves in California with a day off, so they decided to record there.

“I just wanted to document the sound of the band, yeah, like, as a live band, essentially,” which made the analog studio a perfect fit for them, because they recorded the album in one day to a tape machine.

“None of us had ever made a record before where you just played and played, and then that’s it,” he says. “I was like, ‘Oh, wow, that was easy.’ There are so many mistakes on there, but we loved it.”

The result is a raw, jolting collection of songs of garage-punk that feels immediate and alive, the kind of energy you only get when you just play. The music feels new, threaded with traces of classic rock, ’60s and ’70s punk, and hazy psych. It’s no wonder his music leans toward classic sounds — Baldwin was raised on it.

“I remember being really, really young, and like, hearing The Ramones and Neil Young and stuff and being like, ‘I like that,’” he says.

His dad would rent concert films and documentaries — from The Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense to The Who documentary The Kids Are All Right to Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps.

“I was super into that. And then, like, kind of wanted to be a drummer really badly, because I loved Keith Moon.”

He asked his parents for a drum kit. Instead, when he was around six years old, they bought him a guitar. “But I was so young, I was just interested in all of this. I was like, ‘this is cool too. I’ll just do this,’” he says.

He would eventually become a drummer anyway, before shifting paths again after moving from Denton to Austin.

Talking with him over the phone, it’s pretty clear that he lives, breathes and dreams music. And it shows. Baldwin has taken everything — from the classic rock foundation, the garage-punk lineage, the lessons learned on stage and from behind the scenes — and turned it into something that feels both fresh and familiar.

If you really want to understand it, you probably shouldn’t just listen to them, you should see them live: raw and loud. Catch Gus Baldwin and The Sketch when they play in El Paso on April 9 at Rosewood Bar.

For Your Listening/Viewing Pleasure

Gus Baldwin and The Sketch Bandcamp: https://gusbaldwin.bandcamp.com/