Bad News

Zoo Freaks, settle back into the booth for a minute, because the Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on a record that still smells like fresh vinyl and highway dust. The cut is "Bad News," track seven off the self-titled album Ace Monroe, cut by the Nashville rock and roll outfit that borrowed its name from a real live classmate and then spent the next few years proving the handle was no accident. This is not a slow blues confession and it is not a ballad you sway to with a lighter. It is three minutes and five seconds of straight adrenaline, clocked around 188 beats a minute, and it does not take a breath until the last cymbal dies. The boys in the band have said, plain as a road sign, that it was the last song they wrote for that 2023 record and that they do not have anything else like it. High octane. In your face. Fast rock and roll. That is the whole sermon.

The story inside the groove is one every long-haired rider on this frequency already knows by heart. The band put it this way in their own track talk: we all know her, we all know one person this song depicts. It is about meeting a girl who is maybe not the best thing for you, having the time of your life while it lasts, and knowing full well it will not last very long. One of them called it a fun song about somebody you never want to see again, and another said he could not imagine the record without it. The chorus carries an old-school punk attitude, straight and unblinking, while the verses stay locked to a backbeat that drummer Jonathan Tatooles built after watching Stewart Copeland. He took a page from the Police playbook, holding the pocket and keeping the floor tom rolling, dropping accents the way those records do, then cranked the whole thing until it felt like Stewart Copeland and Tommy Lee had been poured into the same kit. No breakdown. No polite little bridge where everybody catches their wind. They likened the ride to climbing into a 1978 Trans Am and not lifting until the song runs out of road. That is "Bad News." You hear it once and you know why the Crew keeps it in the rack next to the Faces and the Stones.

The self-titled album Ace Monroe landed on November 17, 2023, and "Bad News" sits seventh in a tight eight-song run that also takes in "Lightning," "Summer Heat," "Don't Mind," "Come On, Come On," "Workin' Like a Dog," "The Hangman," and "Letters." Writing credit on "Bad News" belongs to the whole original five: Tatooles, bassist Erik McIntyre, guitarist Jack Kaiser, lead guitarist Josh Alfano, and then-singer Robbie Dylan. Andy Freeman produced it. The band has always said they are dedicated to furthering the sound that made them want to make music in the first place, and this cut is that promise with the throttle stuck open. Aerosmith, the Rolling Stones, the Faces, Led Zeppelin, a little Lynyrd Skynyrd swing and a little Motown pocket in the blood. None of that is costume. It is the record collection they grew up hauling around, turned back out through bell-bottoms, leather, and a stack of originals.

If you want the long version of how these cats got started, pull up a stool. Nobody in the band is named Ace and nobody is named Monroe. Late in 2019, Josh Alfano was hunting a jam at the University of Tennessee and slid into Jonathan Tatooles's messages asking if he wanted to play. Tatooles has said he was a freshman, he did not really feel like it, and he went anyway. Thank goodness he did. The first riff Alfano played was the one that became "Gospel," and Tatooles knew on the spot that something special had walked into the dorm. Jack Kaiser was the audience of one, on his way out the door, and he stayed. He has told it that Alfano looked as cool as he always does, and that when the jam ended he knew whatever was forming, he had to be in it. Robbie Dylan was across town auditioning for a writers' round at the Bluebird Cafe, skeptical of college bands and not even hunting a group. A mutual friend walked up after the round, said she knew a band that could play but needed a singer, and passed his number along. He gave it a shot. Erik McIntyre found them the old-fashioned way, a Facebook ad full of bell-bottoms and long hair, a blonde singer who could belt, a drummer hitting harder than Keith Moon, and riffs that reminded him of the guitar gods of the seventies. Coffee, an intimidating audition, a lot of practice, and he had the bass chair.

The name itself is a campus tall tale that happens to be true. Tatooles was sitting in microeconomics, not paying the kind of attention the professor wanted, trying to dream up a band name while roll was called. The teacher hit the name Ace Monroe and it landed like a brick. Next class, Jonathan walked up to a stranger, introduced himself as the guy in the back who was in a rock and roll band, and asked if they could borrow the name. The real Ace Monroe said sure. The band has said they are eternally grateful to that family, and by their own telling they have met just about all of them since. From that dorm-room spark they cut the debut, Shelter in Place, on weekends in Alfano's apartment and turned it loose in February 2022. The self-titled record followed in November 2023, the one that carries "Bad News." A live album from the Exit/In arrived in 2024, and Wild Card, their longest set, came in 2025. None of them grew up in Nashville. They moved there in their late teens and early twenties and called it an iron-sharpens-iron town, a place where the players around you will not let you coast. In early 2026 Robbie Dylan and the band parted ways on good terms, and Jack Kaiser, who had been the rhythm guitar voice in the harmonies all along, stepped to the front mic. The records they made with Robbie, including this one, still stand as the foundation.

That is the trip the Zoo Crew is on with this spin. A last-minute song that became the match under the whole album. A true story about a girl who was bad news and a good time. A drum part lifted from a Police video and a Mötley Crüe attitude, played by five guys who met in a dorm, a cafe, and a classified ad, then named themselves after a kid in economics class. If you are riding with the Freaks, you already know the feeling. The song starts, the floor tom does not let up, and by the time it is over you are grinning like you got away with something. Come hang with the rest of the tribe over at THE ZOO, where the Crew keeps the freeform rock rolling and the deep cuts never sit in the crate for long.

The band keeps the home fire at their official website, Ace Monroe, which is the right door for tour dates and whatever they are hauling out of the studio next. You can also find the official camp on Facebook and on Instagram. We went looking for an official X account flying the band's flag and could not turn up one that belongs to them, so we left that trail alone rather than send anybody down a wrong road. No separate fan site or public Facebook group checked out as a steady, open clubhouse either, so the website, Facebook, and Instagram are the lights worth following. Spin it again, Freaks. "Bad News" only gets better the second time the needle drops.