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Many of the artists and songs on this list were featured on Music Discovery Monday or the HRD Radio Report. Hard Rock Daddy prides itself on giving exposure to artists that fly below radio’s radar…from artists whose careers date back to the ‘80s to today’s up-and-comers. To make the list as user-friendly as possible, it is subdivided into the following categories: Top 25 Hard Rock Songs (regardless of genre), Top 65 Active Rock Songs, Top 45 Classic/Mainstream Rock Songs, Top 20 Prog/Power/Heavy Metal Songs and last, but certainly not least, the Top 5 Southern Rock Songs of 2015. The Top 135 Hard Rock Songs of 2015 is a musical journey that spans the globe and a number of sub-genres. While a good portion of the songs on the list were heard throughout the year on SiriusXM’s Octane and on Active Rock radio stations throughout North America, this list gives a much broader look at the year in hard rock music.
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To give our readers the greatest possible variety of music, the Top 135 Hard Rock Songs of 2015 only features one song per album release (although a number of artists released more than one single worthy of recognition during the year). It started with the Top 52 Hard Rock Songs of 2013in the year of our launch, and was followed by the Top 100 Hard Rock Songs of 2014last year. In 2015, the hard rock and metal genres continued to flourish, so much so that we have once again increased the number of songs featured on the year-end list. Pop-metal and hair metal (and the excess and formula that had come to be associated with both) were effectively wiped off the musical map by grunge in 1991 some pop-metal bands continued to record for smaller labels and cult audiences, but the music's reputation had suffered too much to restore its former glamour.Hard Rock Daddy presents the Top 135 Hard Rock Songs of 2015. But by and large, the hair bands reigned supreme, playing lots of sleazy Aerosmith boogie and big AOR-style power ballads with bits of Van Halen flash Poison embodied the glammed-up, party-hearty excess of hair metal perhaps better than any. Not all subsequent pop-metal fell into the slick, image-conscious hair-metal camp Guns N' Roses, Tesla, and Skid Row often had a grittier edge, and Extreme was unpredictably eclectic, while veteran rockers Kiss, Aerosmith, and Alice Cooper all staged pop-friendly comebacks. The following year, Def Leppard's Hysteria set new standards for smoothed-out production as well as blockbuster sales.
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Bon Jovi's 1986 smash Slippery When Wet ushered in the age of hair metal, where photogenic looks (and, yes, teased-up hair) became just as important in selling a band as the music itself. The first wave of pop-metal - bands like Motley Crue (who would later become superstars), Quiet Riot, Dokken, Ratt, and Twisted Sister - wasn't quite as poppy as it would later become, save for Def Leppard's 1983 landmark Pyromania, perhaps the most melodic metal album up to that point. Next came Van Halen, whose wild party-rock and virtuoso lead guitarist set the style for much of the pop-metal that followed. Kiss' music was catchy and utterly simple, and their wildly theatrical visuals were an essential part of their appeal. '70s artists like Aerosmith and Alice Cooper had an undeniable influence on pop-metal, but the band that sparked the true genesis of the style was Kiss. While pop-metal sounded loud and aggressive on the surface, it nearly always had a slick studio sheen that kept it radio-friendly. Most of the Los Angeles-based bands (where the scene was heavily concentrated) also drew on the elaborate visual stylings of British glam rock, which resulted in the much-maligned "hair metal" boom of the late '80s.
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Some pop-metal bands emphasized metal's most important building block - the guitar riff - more than others, but pop-metal's main attraction were the huge, catchy hooks that owed a great deal to the fist-pumping choruses of arena rock. The least metallic variation of heavy metal, pop-metal became the most popular form of hard rock during the '80s.