Junkyard

This 1989 debut album went largely ignored because it got lost in the shadow of hair metal. Yet the sonic sucker punches fly fast and hard: “Hollywood” ranks as the era’s best rock ode to Tinseltown, “Hot Rod” mashes ’70s glam with ’50s rockabilly, and the proletariat weeper “Working Man” coulda been Skynyrd. There’s a hard-luck charmer (“Life Sentence”) and a rowdy Lone Star state shout-out (“Texas”), while “Can’t Hold Back” shows where Buckcherry learned their tricks. Junkyard rose from the denim-and-tattoo school of junky riffs, a near-deserted place on the Sunset Strip where Southern rock, white-boy blooze, and Johnny Thunders all brawled.