1989

Zoo Freaks, the Crew just dropped the needle on a cut that feels like somebody opened a time capsule and found the record they meant to make before life got in the way. "1989" is Nestor, the Swedish melodic hard rock outfit out of Falköping, and it sits on their debut album Kids in a Ghost Town. That album title is not a gimmick. Singer Tobias Gustavsson and drummer Mattias Carlsson grew up in the same small Swedish town, the kind of place bassist Marcus Åblad has called a ghost town, and the whole record is built around being kids there with rock-star dreams and a last summer before the grown-up world showed up. If you have ever stood in a parking lot after a show wondering where the night went, you already know the feeling these guys are chasing. Over on THE ZOO we have been living in that lane for a long time, freeform album rock and the deep cuts that still hit when the chorus comes around.

The song is not a random year stamped on a chorus. It is the year the band actually started. Gustavsson and guitarist Jonny Wemmenstedt put Nestor together in Falköping in 1989, when they were about fourteen and convinced the world was waiting on them. Keyboard player Martin Frejinger and Carlsson came in next, and Åblad settled in on bass after a few lineup changes. They played shows, cut a handful of EPs, and kept the dream alive into the middle of the nineties. Then jobs, relationships, and ordinary life did what they usually do. By around 1996 the band had gone quiet, and the album they had pictured never got made. Folks who heard Kids in a Ghost Town years later sometimes figured the 1989 origin story was lore, the way some bands invent a planet to hail from. Åblad has laughed at that one. It was real. They just did not have the chops, the money, or the luck to finish the job the first time.

The name is a comic-book joke that stuck. Gustavsson has said they borrowed it from Nestor, the butler in the Belgian strip Tintin. Five kids liked the sound of it, and that was enough. What they liked even more was the records on the turntable. Eighties Kiss sits at the top of that pile. In a talk with Web Is Jericho, Gustavsson was asked about a pre-chorus on the first album that lands a lot like Kiss and "I'll Fight Hell to Hold You." He did not dodge it. He said that part is "1989," and that Crazy Nights, Asylum, and Animalize had been a huge influence. He treats those echoes as homage, not a swipe. Same interview, he pointed at another cut on the record that carries the vibe of Van Halen's "Right Now" while the chorus goes its own way. The idea, the way he tells it, is to give something back to the songs they grew up on. Bon Jovi, Journey, Toto, Bryan Adams, Giant, Van Halen, and Twisted Sister all get named when he talks about the toolbox. The songs came first. Distorted guitars made it hard rock. Keyboards might have made it something else. They chose the guitars.

"1989" was the first song Gustavsson and Wemmenstedt wrote for the reunion album, and it carries the references to the year everything started. In a Norwegian rock interview, Gustavsson said the track came with all of those markers built in. A Swedish conversation with Rocknytt fills in the room where it happened. During the lockdown years he was home in Spain, where he has lived for a long stretch, uneasy about how shaky the world felt, and he started playing the records from 1983 to 1989 that had made the future look bright. Kiss and "A Million to One." Twisted Sister and "The Prize." Out of that came "1989," and out of the song came the pitch he made to the old band: make the record about growing up in a small town with oversized ambition, and do not take no for an answer. The lyric sits at the end of July. Two kids on the run. A wish to turn the clock back to the year he used to call her name. By the last chorus he still cannot get her off his mind. It is a love song and a band-origin song wearing the same jacket.

The reunion pitch was a time machine, and he has told that story more than once. Sitting at the piano in Spain, he drifted into Foreigner and Whitesnake and the rest of the eighties songbook. His wife noticed and asked if he ought to make an album of that music. He called Wemmenstedt, the guitar player he had kept writing with in other bands across the years, and asked if they should climb into that machine, go back to 1989, and cut the album they never had the skill or the chance to cut then. Wemmenstedt was in. They rang the others. Åblad's answer, the way Gustavsson remembers it, was simple: what took you so long. They had to sort leave from day jobs, including Frejinger's work as a school principal, before the sessions could really roll. The record came out in the fall of 2021, their first official full-length after more than thirty years, and it picked up a Swedish Grammis nomination in the hard rock and metal category. They shot a proper video for "1989" along with clips for "On the Run," "Signed in Blood," and the Samantha Fox duet "Tomorrow." Fox landed on the album because, as Åblad has told it, she was on the bedroom posters when they were teenagers, so they asked. She said yes.

Live, the song has kept its place. A Swedish review of their Gröna Lund show in Stockholm, in front of a couple thousand people, singled out "1989" with the title track, "Signed in Blood," and "Firesign." The follow-up album, Teenage Rebel, picked the story up a few years later in the same hometown myth, and Gustavsson has said the first record was mostly about being a kid in Falköping while the second one walks a little further down the road. He still writes the bulk of the songs, with Wemmenstedt bringing riffs and the rest of the band weighing in. The mission line they use has not changed much: formed by friends in 1989, reinvented in 2021, out to restore the glory of rock.

If the chorus on "1989" has you wanting the rest of the story, the band keeps the lights on at the official site, Nestor The Band, where the Kids in a Ghost Town era and the "1989" video still sit with the newer news, including their own NestorFest back in Falköping. The same crew posts on Facebook, shares the road shots on Instagram, and checks in on X. Put the record on again when the chorus hits. It still sounds like five kids who finally got the album they were hearing in their heads back when the year on the calendar matched the title.