Rock The City

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on Storace and "Rock This City," the third cut on Crossfire, and if you are a Zoo Freak who still believes a song can pull a night back from the ditch, this one is built for the long haul. Marc Storace, the Maltese-born voice that put Swiss hard rock on the world map with Krokus, put it plain when the single came out ahead of the album: the tune is about a relationship gone wrong, saved by a young man's ability to snap out of a negative state of mind and win back the love of his life. He called it a great song for the live shows. That is the whole postcard. No mystery novel, no concept-record fog. Just a guy who has sung in arenas for decades telling you the story in one breath.

The lyric opens like a morning after a rough night by the water. A breeze on a sleepy face, sun on salty shades, waves crashing, and her voice calling him to turn around. Then the chorus kicks the porch door open. Gotta get up, get with it, let it all out, rock this city. It is not a speed-metal sprint. Reviewers who lived with the record called it a moderately paced pounder, stadium-ready, the kind of groove that sits between the straight-ahead roar of old Krokus and the bigger, hook-heavy shine of mid-eighties arena rock. One listener summed the whole album as what you might get if AC/DC and Def Leppard had shared a rehearsal room. "Rock This City" is the cut a lot of them circled first, right alongside "Adrenaline," "Thrill And A Kiss," and "Hell Yeah." On the album it arrives after a short interlude called "The New Unity," like the band clearing its throat before the anthem.

The writing room tells you why it feels both familiar and new. Marc built the songs with drummer Pat Aeby, an old Krokus hand, and Tommy Henriksen, the Alice Cooper guitarist who also produced Crossfire. Marc did not hide how that partnership landed. He said Henriksen, even with a tight touring schedule that took in Alice Cooper, the Hollywood Vampires, and his own Crossbone Skully, actually made time to produce the album. Creating the songs with him felt like magic. Henriksen then brought in Olle Romo, the engineer long associated with Mutt Lange, to mix it. Marc called that a match made in heaven and closed the thought the way a biker DJ would: play it loud. The record landed on Frontiers Music on November 22, 2024, the second studio album under the Storace name after 2021's Live And Let Live. The live band around the sessions was Dom Favez on rhythm guitar, Serge Christen on lead, Emi Meyer on bass, and Patrick Aeby on drums. Ask Marc about the stage and he will light up about Meyer. He has known her for years from traveling rock shows in Switzerland, and he says the way she slaps that bass is something you have to see, long curly hair and all.

When an interviewer asked which cities he likes to rock, he did not dodge into a slogan. Hamburg left a mark. Munich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt. Zurich, where the Hallenstadion still feels like a temple of rock. Geneva. Across the water he named London, Manchester, Glasgow, Newcastle, and Cardiff, places he would like to revisit with this band. That list is the other half of the song title. "Rock This City" is a love story on the lyric sheet and a road map in the man's head.

None of that voice arrived fully formed in a Swiss rehearsal room. Marc Storace was born in Sliema, Malta, on October 7, 1951, one of six kids, and he taught himself to sing. At fourteen, around 1965, he was already on local stages with Stonehenge Union, covering the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Troggs, and the Kinks, and with The Boys, who stretched into harder vocal stuff, including "Aquarius" from Hair. The island was the classroom. The road came later.

By the end of 1971 he had landed in Switzerland with TEA, the progressive hard rock band that became the country's international flagship for a stretch. A roadie named René Tinner had seen him and told the band their bass player wanted to stop singing and just play. Marc hitchhiked over with an address on a scrap of paper, found the group living together in a house by the lake, and stayed nearly seven years. TEA cut albums with Dieter Dierks, the producer tied to the Scorpions in those years, and shared bills with Queen, Nazareth, and the Baker Gurvitz Army, rolling as far as Hamburg, London, Glasgow, Naples, and back to Malta. Their last tour, in 1976, carried a young Krokus as the support act. The seed sat in the dirt for a while. Marc went back to London, formed Eazy Money, and got a song called "Telephone Man" onto the Metal for Muthas Volume 2 compilation. Then the phone rang. Chris von Rohr, Krokus founder, invited him to a weekend jam. One long weekend later he was in. Metal Rendez-Vous arrived in 1980, the world tours followed, and the band sold more than fifteen million records. There is an old story that he was approached about the AC/DC job after Bon Scott died. Loyalty to the Swiss camp won. He has said he usually sits in and stays. Seven years with TEA, then decades with Krokus.

The solo chapter was not a vanity project. Krokus had planned a farewell, played a sold-out last stand at that same Zurich Hallenstadion in December 2019, and then the lockdown years froze whatever dates were left. Marc has said he had no choice but to go out under his own name. Live And Let Live came at the end of 2021, a Swiss tour followed in the middle of the pandemic, and by May 2022 a new band was on the boards. Crossfire was the next chapter, written through 2023 and 2024 while Krokus, nudged by fans who would not let the retirement stick, started taking festival dates again. He has called the solo band the thing that fills the gap Krokus leaves, and he sounds happy working both. At an age when a lot of singers mail it in, he is still hitting the notes and still writing songs about getting up and rocking the city in front of you.

The home base for all of that is the official site at Storace, where the band bio walks through TEA, Krokus, Live And Let Live, and Crossfire itself. Day to day he keeps the campfire on the verified Marc Storace Facebook page, which is where the "Rock This City" note first went out to the faithful, and on Instagram, where he points people straight at Crossfire and calls it his official account. No separate public X account turned up that actually belongs to him and talks about the record, so the Crew is not going to hand you a wrong door. If you want the wider circle, the active Krokus Fans Worldwide group still trades stories, old tour shirts, and Storace show news in the same breath. Spin it loud, Zoo Freaks, and when you want the next deep cut without the commercials, you know where the lantern is hanging at THE ZOO.