Running

The Zoo Crew has got a real runner on the turntable, and the Zoo Freaks know a good road song when they hear one. "Running" comes off Phoenix, the debut album from The Gems, three Swedish rockers who walked out of one band and lit the next one themselves. Guernica Mancini is out front on the vocals, Mona Lindgren, who also answers to Demona, is on guitar and bass, and Emlee Johansson is behind the kit. The record landed on Napalm Records on January 26, 2024, and it clocks in around forty-five minutes of hard rock with a classic streak running through it. "Running" sits at track nine, just under three minutes, produced by Johan Randén, and it does exactly what the title promises. It comes out of the gate at a sprint.

Guernica has told the story of this one more than once, and it is worth hearing the way she tells it. She had already written "Running" for a solo project she had parked on ice. She loves a band more than she loves going it alone, and once the three of them decided they were staying together, she brought the song to Mona and Emlee. They liked it. Then they made it a Gems song. Emlee put her stamp on the drums, Mona did the same on the guitar, and the arrangement tightened up until it belonged to all three of them. In a conversation around the release of Phoenix, Emlee singled out "Running" and "Force Of Nature" as the cuts she was especially proud of. She called them fun songs, and she was honest about why they mattered to her as a drummer. In the old band she had been held back. On these tracks she finally got to play. That driving rhythm you hear right at the top is her, and the guitar solo that follows is Mona cutting loose over the top of it.

The words are not about a getaway car, even if the groove feels like one. Guernica is singing about the phony picture people paint for the likes, the smiley faces in wonderful places, the thirsty shallow snakes, and the habit of running from the truth. The chorus keeps coming back to it. We keep running, running, running from the truth. By the end she is talking about going off the grid and forgetting the flakes. For a station that still believes in album sides and long conversations between songs, that lands pretty clean. The Zoo Freaks have always preferred the real thing to the filtered version, and this cut says the same thing at highway speed.

Writers who sat with Phoenix heard it different ways, which is usually a sign the song has some meat on it. One review called it haunting and set it beside "Send Me To The Wolves," "Ease Your Pain," and the title single "Like A Phoenix" as a favorite. Another said it storms out of the gate on Emlee's drums, with soaring vocals giving way to a sharp guitar solo, and called it an absolutely killer track. A third heard a Van Halen feel in the riff and filed it as one of the lighter cuts on an otherwise heavy record, which only tells you how stacked the album is. A German write-up noted that Guernica sings parts of it so fast you can barely keep up. Fast beats, fast lyrics, a little Los Angeles rock shine on a Stockholm chassis. That is "Running."

The album around it has its own story, and the song makes more sense once you know the room it was written in. Phoenix opens with a short piece called "Aurora," then rolls through "Queens," a tip of the hat to the women of rock and roll who cleared the road, "Send Me To The Wolves," "Domino," "Silver Tongue," and "Undiscovered Paths." There is a violin interlude called "Maria's Song" that leads into the ballad "Ease Your Pain," and that is the breath before "Running" kicks the door back open. After that come "Like A Phoenix," "P.S.Y.C.H.O," "Kiss It Goodbye," "Force Of Nature," "Fruits Of My Labor," and an acoustic reading of the title song. The cover art nods toward the old Kiss album Destroyer, which tells you something about the company these three keep in their heads. Colored vinyl showed up in blue, purple, and a yellow-and-red marble die-hard pressing. The whole thing was cut, mixed, and recorded with Randén, with Thomas Johansson on the mastering.

How they got here is the part the Zoo Crew keeps coming back to, because it is a rock and roll story of the old kind. Guernica, Emlee, and Mona had spent years in Thundermother, the Swedish hard rock outfit that took them out with Scorpions and Whitesnake and onto festival stages like Wacken, Sweden Rock, and Alcatraz. They were on the Black and Gold album. They thought they were a band in the real sense, splitting the work, answering the mail, holding the thing together. Then founding guitarist Filippa Nässil fired Guernica on her own. Mona and Emlee walked out with her. Guernica has said she never would have taken herself out of that situation, even though it had been toxic for a long time, and that she is grateful the other two left a real career on the table to try something that felt right. She has compared the split to a bad divorce. The wounds, she has said, take years.

They did not sit with it. Before they had even told the world they were gone, they had booked a writing session with Randén. Out of those first days came "Send Me To The Wolves" and the song that became "Like A Phoenix." Emlee had actually written "Like A Phoenix" for Thundermother, and it got turned down. Their old colleague, Guernica has said, did not care for anything to do with phoenixes. She is glad it was refused. It fit the new story better. The first single from the new band hit number two on the German rock radio airplay chart in the summer of 2023, and Napalm, who had already been in touch from the Thundermother years, put the album out. Phoenix arrived on Guernica's birthday.

The name came easy. Guernica was playing with their initials, G for Guernica, E for Emlee, M for Mona, and somebody noticed that G.E.M. was already a word. They added the S and started calling themselves superwomen when they felt like it. The Gems. Diamonds, if you ask the German press. They have said their mission is to keep the rock alive and keep the torch burning, mixing the old stuff they love with a modern production. Friendship, loyalty, and a sisterhood that only a mess like that can give you. That is how Guernica has put it, and you can hear it in the way "Running" got finished. One woman brought a song she had written alone. The other two rearranged it until it belonged to the band. Then they played it like they had some lost time to make up.

If you want the rest of the trail, the band keeps house at thegems.se, posts the road pictures and the new songs on Facebook, and runs the day-to-day over on Instagram. Since Phoenix they have kept writing, put out a second album called Year Of The Snake, and stayed on the festival circuit. The lineup has shifted some since those first sessions, the way lineups do when the road gets long, but the debut still stands as the record where the three of them proved the walkout was worth it. Spin "Running" loud, let the drums do the talking, and when you want another deep cut from the same shelf, you know where the Zoo Freaks gather. That would be THE ZOO.