Modern Vintage by Sixx A.M.

Modern Vintage, the third studio album from Sixx:A.M., came out on Eleven Seven Music in 2014, and the title pretty much tells you the plan: glossy, present-day hard rock with an ear cocked toward the classic stuff. The Los Angeles trio started out in 2007 as a side project for Nikki Sixx, still holding down bass in Mötley Crüe at the time, with guitarist DJ Ashba and singer James Michael, and the band's name is simply the three of them stitched together.

By now the side project was pulling its weight. Michael's big, polished voice sits front and center, Ashba's guitars go for arena-sized crunch, and "Stars" reaches for the kind of wide-open, fist-in-the-air chorus the band built its name on. It climbed to number 20 on the Billboard 200 and went all the way to the top of the Hard Rock Albums chart, a strong showing for a band that was never meant to be anybody's day job.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.