By Meltdown | WRIF Detroit
Catching up with ZouZou Mansour is always a good time—even if she’s sitting in front of a cement wall that makes her look like she’s doing time. “I’m locked in, Meltdown. I’m always feeling locked in,” she joked as we kicked off our conversation.
ZouZou and I go way back to their first run through Detroit when I showed them around town, including a legendary stop for Mexican food and a night at the Token Lounge. “That was some damn good food,” she laughed. “And I think you and Mike were talking sports a lot… Travis had that King Diamond shirt on, which everybody loved.”
They’re back at it again with tour dates lined up, including June 20 at the Lager House in Detroit and Motoblot Fest in Chicago on June 28. “We’re building a little Midwest tour around it,” she said. “We always play with bands we love.”
ZouZou and Soraia are also back out with Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, and they’re not just opening—they’re part of the extended family. “They always give us a long set. Usually, as a support act, you get 20, maybe 25 minutes. They give us 45 all the time,” she said. “Joan always gives me this kind of nod like… ‘Keep going, girl.’”
I had to ask what Joan was like offstage. “She’s exactly what you see is what you get,” ZouZou told me. “She’s cool and she’s genuine. I told her she saved my life, and she just leaned back and said, ‘Aren’t you doing that now?’”
ZouZou and I swapped stories about horror movies, haunted places, and paranormal podcasts (we both love that stuff), but the real core of this chat was Soraia’s new EP, "Confessions from the Vena Cava."
“So Holy” is the first single and it’s a ripper—gritty, raw, and unapologetic. The band recorded in Sweden with legendary producer Tomas Skogsberg. “He said, ‘I hear a lot of punk kind of attitude in what you do. I want to capture more of that,’” she told me. “He didn’t change anything—he just added. He’s all about capturing who the band is.”
The whole experience was stripped down and honest. “We stayed on his property—it’s like a farmhouse. Very humble. We sat around a picnic table with coffee and talked music. It was perfect.”
The title of the EP came from, of all things, a trivia show. “The answer was ‘vena cava’—it’s the biggest vein in the body that reoxygenates blood. I thought, ‘That’s it.’ It felt like a metaphor. We’re reoxygenating our sound and trying to breathe something new into what we do.”
The band lineup includes ZouZou, Brianna, Travis, and Mike Jaffe. They sometimes bring in additional players for bigger shows—including a guitarist named Lars from Sweden. “If you’re recording overseas, you’ve gotta have someone named Lars,” I joked. She laughed, “It’s kind of mandatory!”
“Confessions from the Vena Cava” drops September 12, with new singles landing May 16 and August. They’ll be hitting the West Coast in July and Europe later this year.
If you’re into real, gritty rock ‘n roll with soul and sweat all over it, give Soraia a spin. As I said to wrap things up, “Anyone looking for a straight-ahead raw rock band—look no further.”
And yeah, I’ll probably post more dog pics for ZouZou soon, too.
