Sixx:A.M.- The Heroin Diaries Soundtrack: 10th Anniversary Edition album review

Nikki Sixx’s descent into hell, revisited

Cover art for Sixx:A.M.- The Heroin Diaries Soundtrack: 10th Anniversary Edition album

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

In retrospect, the success of the debut SIXX:A.M. album was the first death knell for Nikki’s then day job with Mötley Crüe. It might have been there to serve as the soundtrack to his gruelling drugs biography of the same name, but it showed a sharper, more shrewd and contemplative songwriter than people thought capable from a man who once rhymed ’fifty thousand screaming watts’ with ’honey dripping from her pot’.

Time has been kind to the songs and production too, and for this 10th Anniversary Edition the band have reworked three of the originals to offer some extra impetus for parting with your cash for an album you probably already own. That said, there’s no denying the impact and craft of songs like utterly bleak Van Nuys and the yearning imbued in Accidents Can Happen: the sound of a man clinging to sobriety by his very fingertips.

Philip Wilding

Philip Wilding is a novelist, journalist, scriptwriter, biographer and radio producer. As a young journalist he criss-crossed most of the United States with bands like Motley Crue, Kiss and Poison (think the Almost Famous movie but with more hairspray). More latterly, he’s sat down to chat with bands like the slightly more erudite Manic Street Preachers, Afghan Whigs, Rush and Marillion.