The Totally Unobjective Top 10 Best Hair Metal Bands
Let the controversies begin. What follows is our list of the Top 10 Best Hair Metal Bands. No science or math was involved in the selection of this list. Just pure nostalgia. Stay rad y’all.
1. Motley Crue
These guys are my number one just based on the sheer number of songs that make my fist clench and levitate in the air and my leg to start thumping in time with the beat. I acknowledge that a lot of these hair metal masters were pigs and lived a disgusting life of excessive drinking, drugging and extreme risk behaviour and I don’t condone any of that mess. Their sound and the recording quality of layered guitars, Tommy Lee’s drum patterns and Vince Neil’s signature primal screams and shouts as they tear that mother down is unmistakably glam metal to the core.
2. Poison
These guys were pretty. Even as a heterosexual man, I can say that I thought they were beautiful. Anyone that can make you excited for something as nonsensical as singing the words “unskinny bop” really blows me away still to this day. They could rock hard or play acoustic love songs perfect for any grade 7/8 dance to get over the awkward “wanna dance” moment near the beginning of the night.
3. Guns N’ Roses
How cool was a band who featured people with names like: Slash and Axl? These dudes were so edgy; they swore on recordings, they smoked and even their guitar had a cigarette and yet they looked like glam rockers. Straight ahead anthems like welcome to the jungle, tempered with epic ballads like November Rain and Slash’s ability to play electric guitar in the middle of a desert or in the middle of the ocean in the rain made GNR a ferocious force for hair metal supremacy.
4. Def Leppard
A drummer with one arm that could drum as well or better than most other drummers helped set Def Leppard apart from their contemporaries. That and the band’s relentless pursuit of the richest bodied sound, comprised of guitar tracks stacked on top of each other in double digit quantities and swelling vocals layered to create a wall of sound that is instantly recognizable. Have truer words ever been spoken than: “love bites?” So true Def Leppard, so true.
5. Skid Row
These guys were a little late to the party but rocked hard when they hit the TV airwaves in 1987. Frontman Sebastian Bach is a tool and a lot of his actions were akin to those of a clown or worse an insensitive homophobic jerk. To his credit, he tried to apologize later in life. The music of Skid Row is immediately recognizable as glam metal. I wonder how many more singles they might have produced if they hadn’t been swept aside by grunge as they reached their zenith.
6. Bon Jovi
Jon Bon Jovi has one heck of an ego but boy could he sing. Realistically, Bon Jovi should probably be higher on this list but as much as they rocked, there was something that grated on me from time to time about this band. My relationship to their music comes in peaks and valleys. Slippery When Wet holds a special place in my heart but as is the case for me, with all Bon Jovi albums, I can only listen to it a few times before I grow tired of it and switch it out for something else. The “behind the music” documentary about how Jon almost permanently damaging his voice because of the way he was singing (or moreso yelling) is an interesting watch.
7. Twisted Sister
I really don’t know what to say about this band. Weird and wonderful. Definitely now a bit of a guilty pleasure. It was hard to take these guys seriously, and I’m not entirely sure if they took themselves seriously. They looked the part of glam metal for sure and they were seemingly everywhere, even making an appearance in PeeWee’s Big Adventure. A subsection of a generation who identified with the sentiment that “we’re not gonna take it” and many of them didn’t even know what it was they were rebelling against but it was cool to be a rebel anchors this band in the middle of the glam metal music scene.
8. Cinderella
More brunette big hairdos than blonde, these guys were semi-successful at morphing from glam metal to a more bluesy rock sound but the vocals were always anchored in glam metal screamy screeches. The vocals were so scratchy that the lead singer had to have multiple surgeries to repair his damaged vocal chords, failing to course-correct before it was too late, like Jon Bon Jovi did. The 1990 Shelter Me music video was so much fun as Little Richard makes an appearance and the 80s saxophone solo hits, trying to maintain relevance at the turn of the century.
9. Warrant
Unapologetically glam, these guys produced some memorable decadent excess-laden hymns like Sweet Cherry Pie to the heartfelt tearjerker that was Heaven isn’t too far away. Some people might challenge me that they belong on the top 10 list; but I would challenge them to tell me who you would sub in instead?
10. Honeymoon Suite (for some CanCon)
Canadian glam metal rockers that made the list pretty much solely based on my desire to show a little bit of perm rockin’ patriotism. New Girl Now was mandatory listening North of the border here. And given the context of the rest of the hair metal soundscape, these guys weren’t half bad.
And with that, we’ve come to the end of our Top 10 Best Hair Metal Bands! Thanks for stopping by.
What do you think? Did we miss a band that you think deserves a spot on the Top 10 Best Hair Metal Bands List? Let us know by dropping a comment, we’d love to hear from you. Check out our Retro Relevance’s 100% Subjective List of the 10 Raddest Glam Metal Songs: and let us know if we got it right.
Craig is a partner, and proud father of a teenage daughter, and two dogs. He's an avid blogger who loves researching and discussing 80s and 90s nostalgia. When not working on his website or hanging with his fam, Craig enjoys playing guitar, watching lacrosse, and being near water.