The Best Hard Rock Albums of the '80s

Robert John Lange produced it at Compass Point in Nassau, five months after Bon Scott died and with Brian Johnson effectively auditioning on tape. Hells Bells opens on a single bell tolling four times while nothing else happens, and the patience is the whole trick — Angus Young's riff arrives late and hits harder for the wait. Nothing else in the decade starts this confidently.

Geffen put it out in the summer of 1987 and almost nobody bought it; the record did not reach number one in the US until roughly a year later, after MTV finally relented. Sweet Child O' Mine began as a string-skipping warm-up Slash was clowning with in rehearsal, which is why the figure sits awkwardly under the fingers and perfectly on tape. Mike Clink produced.

Eddie Van Halen built 5150 in his own back yard so that nobody could tell him to put the synthesiser away, and Ted Templeman produced the results there. Jump rides an Oberheim OB-Xa patch that a guitar band had no business leading with, went to number one anyway, and makes the solo wait its turn. Last studio album of the David Lee Roth era.

Pete Willis was fired partway through the sessions and Phil Collen finished the guitar parts; Robert John Lange then spent months stacking vocals until every chorus sounded like a terrace full of people. Photograph is the blueprint the rest of the decade copied — hook early, repeat, refuse to leave. Rick Allen still had both arms here, which the follow-up could not say.

Tom Werman produced, and the running order is deliberately strange: a spoken prologue, an instrumental interlude, and a Beatles cover of Helter Skelter dropped in halfway. Looks That Kill is the one that landed — a blunt minor-key riff, Tommy Lee hammering the snare, Vince Neil singing slightly sharp and refusing to apologise. Spotify keeps both umlauts in Mötley Crüe.

Klaus Meine came through throat surgery that nearly ended his singing before these sessions with Dieter Dierks began, which makes the register he reaches here faintly absurd. No One Like You pairs Rudolf Schenker's chugging rhythm with Matthias Jabs answering in short stabs rather than long solos. Border case: this is where hard rock blurs into traditional metal, and Metal '80s takes the other side.

Sequencers and synth pads got bolted onto a Texas blues trio here, with Terry Manning engineering at Ardent in Memphis. Gimme All Your Lovin' locks to a metronomic groove Frank Beard barely deviates from for four minutes, which is precisely why MTV played it into the ground. Spotify's plainly-titled edition is really the 2008 remaster — every track after the first carries the suffix.

Three years and a fortune went into the follow-up, most of it lost while Rick Allen learned to drum with one arm after a December 1984 crash took the other. Pour Some Sugar On Me was written near the end, almost as an afterthought, and became the only song most people can name from it. Twelve tracks, every vocal multiplied past counting.

Desmond Child was brought in to co-write, and Bruce Fairbairn cut it at Little Mountain Sound in Vancouver — which is how a New Jersey bar band ended up with choruses this ruthlessly efficient. Livin' On A Prayer opens on Richie Sambora's talk box and then hands the actual work to the bass. Border case: pop-metal, and the craft is why it sold.

John Sykes co-wrote most of it and played nearly all the guitar, then was out of the band before it reached the shops; Adrian Vandenberg plays the solo on the re-recorded Here I Go Again. Still Of The Night is Sykes at full stretch, complete with a bowed-guitar middle section. Spotify carries the nine-track US edition; outside North America the album is titled 1987.

Sobriety and a second Bruce Fairbairn session in Vancouver got the best-played Aerosmith record of the decade out of a band that had spent the seventies wasting them. Janie's Got a Gun won a Grammy and does something they had never attempted: a hushed, keyboard-led verse and a narrative lyric instead of a leer. Spotify indexes that song as Water Song/Janie's Got A Gun, with the instrumental prelude bolted onto the front.

Milton Berle turns up in the video because the band's manager, Marshall Berle, was his nephew — a detail that says more about 1984 than any review could. Round and Round has Warren DeMartini and Robbin Crosby playing interlocking parts rather than the usual harmonised leads, and that interlock is what separated Ratt from the Sunset Strip queue. Beau Hill produced for Atlantic.

No heavy metal album had ever topped the Billboard 200 before this one managed it in November 1983, which tells you how abruptly the ground moved. Cum on Feel the Noize is a Slade cover the band openly did not want to record, and Kevin DuBrow's shriek over Carlos Cavazo's guitar made it their biggest hit anyway. Border case: pop-metal, cheerfully so.

Dee Snider was called before a US Senate committee in 1985 to defend lyrics from this record, and the hearing did the sales figures no harm at all. We're Not Gonna Take It lifts its melody from O Come, All Ye Faithful — Snider has said so himself — which is why a song about teenage mutiny scans like a hymn. Tom Werman produced.

Michael Wagener produced, and the band arrived attached to Bon Jovi: shared management, an opening slot, and a publishing arrangement the two sides later argued about in public. 18 and Life is why it stuck — a downcast minor-key verse, then Sebastian Bach hitting the chorus like he intends to break something. The RIAA has it at five times platinum.

Vernon Reid had already co-founded the Black Rock Coalition when Mick Jagger produced two of these tracks and helped push the band toward a deal. Cult of Personality opens on a Malcolm X sample and a riff articulated far more precisely than the genre expected. Border case: funk-metal. Spotify's plain edition appends five bonus cuts, two of them live, to the original eleven.