The Gems are a Swedish trio who frame their sound as classic heavy and rock wrapped in a glamorous, modern production. After the 2024 debut Phoenix marked a restart and public statement after years in their previous band, the second album Year of the Snake arrives as a more upbeat, live-driven next step. In interview singer Guernica Mancini spills the beans.
Phoenix still sits behind everything. Guernica describes that record as something they needed to write in order to move on from ”what had happened to us” over those years. Anger, sadness, anxiety, disappointment in people and in the world are all written straight into the songs. ”Phoenix was very healing for us.” Guernica says. The album works like a long session with a therapist and a first loud refusal to reduce their feelings for anyone, especially as an all-female band in a genre that still expects women to stay pleasant and positive.
Year of the Snake shifts the focus without cutting that emotional thread. Musically the band leans further into a slicker, heavy 80s feel while keeping their roots in 70s and 80s rock. Van Halen is part of the DNA, with Queen, KISS and bits of Led Zeppelin always in the background, and a harder edge that nods toward Accept and classic heavy metal on the title track and other cuts.
Lyrically Guernica works from a running list. Any time she hears a phrase that feels fresh, she writes it down for later. One example is Go Along to Get Along, a saying she picked up in a documentary about women in hip-hop. Another is Happy Water, a term she encountered on a trip to Vietnam where local hosts poured her a homemade moonshine served in a bottle with a cobra inside. The band use these scraps as starting points and build songs around them. There is a small fight in there too. ”I’m sick of doing the same thing over and over.” Guernica says. For her, the new album is partly about bringing in words and images that don’t already belong to rock, instead of recycling the same old titles and clichés.
Hot Bait, the lead single, comes out of years on the road. On paper it is a playful shuffle about a one-night stand, but the perspective flips the usual trope. The band wrote it from memory of their early touring days, when they were single, out all the time, and still found that reality for women on the road was closer to being a nun than living The Dirt. A running joke within the group about ”the stars aligning” on the rare nights something actually happened became the hook for the song. The track channels those stories into something light on the surface, with an undercurrent about how lonely touring can be even when it looks wild from the outside.
The title track carries more of Guernica’s spiritual side. She talks about learning to see that things don’t happen to you, they happen for you, and using that mindset to deal with the blowback of the last years. Year of the Snake packages that idea as a straight rock song about shedding skin and evolving, a party riff that hides a small self-help mantra.
Where Phoenix was a necessary purge, Year of the Snake is more about what comes after. The band run their own company and talk openly about five-year plans, not in terms of chart positions but in terms of survival. The shared goal is simple, reach a level where they can live fully off the music, tour every year, and reliably sell out 600–1000 capacity rooms. They want to be a well-established band with a solid fanbase rather than chase stadium fantasies, even if they would happily take a breakthrough if it ever came. At the same time families, kids and finances shape their choices more than before. That tension between big dreams and realistic scales runs under Year of the Snake, a record built for clubs and festivals where the band can keep pushing forward on their own terms.
The Gems interview 02.12.2025
Guernica Mancini
Producer: Janne Vuorela
https://www.instagram.com/thegems.music
Picture: Gustaf Blixt / The Gems
