Sixx:A.M.

Sixx: A.M. took shape around Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx, vocalist James Michael, and DJ Ashba, initially conceived to supply a musical counterpart to Sixx’s memoir The Heroin Diaries. Blending spoken-word passages with shifting strains of heavy metal and hard rock, the project surfaced in 2007 via The Heroin Diaries Soundtrack, whose mainstream-rock standout “Life Is Beautiful” quickly gained traction. Later releases—This Is Gonna Hurt (2011), Modern Vintage (2014), Prayers for the Damned (2016), and Prayers for the Blessed (also 2016)—revealed a more polished hard-rock approach, while the 2021 compilation Hits surveyed the band’s catalog.

The soundtrack’s thirteen cuts mirror the chapters of the book, conjuring an atmospheric narrative through exaggerated ’80s hair-metal gestures, spoken interludes, electro-industrial pulses, and fleeting circus motifs that trace Sixx’s ascent and subsequent collapse. Issued by Eleven Seven Records in August 2007, the album yielded the gold-certified single “Life Is Beautiful,” and two additional tracks performed strongly on modern-rock formats, convincing Sixx to transform what had begun as a one-time studio exercise into a working live act.

The group first toured in 2008 and reconvened in the studio by April 2009 to prepare a follow-up that, like its predecessor, doubled as the soundtrack to Sixx’s next literary project, the photo-and-text volume This Is Gonna Hurt. Sharing that title, the record entered the Billboard 200 at number ten. Even as Sixx rejoined Mötley Crüe for its 2014 farewell trek, he completed the band’s third album, Modern Vintage, which surfaced that October, adopting a brighter, more glam-inflected tone and reaching number twenty on the Billboard 200. Two years afterward, the double-album sequence Prayers for the Damned appeared, its opening half arriving in spring 2016 and the concluding volume, Prayers for the Blessed, Vol. 2, following in November. Hits emerged in 2021, pairing sixteen signature tracks with four newly recorded songs.