You can count Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee among those who believe the band's self-titled 1994 effort never got a fair shake.

"It’s huge. Honestly, dude, it’s one of my favorite Crüe records," Lee tells Beat in a new interview. "Sonically, the songs and the playing on that record is gnarly. We worked our asses off on that record."

As Lee went on to point out, the band's renewed vigor partly stemmed from the fact that they'd fired singer Vince Neil and were starting over with new vocalist John Corabi. But returning from a five-year layoff between new records with a markedly different sound, they faced what turned out to be an insurmountable uphill battle.

"We had so much to prove: Vince was gone, we had a new singer who also plays guitar and writes and he brought a whole new element to this. But once fans are used to a certain thing, they just didn’t want to know about any other version of Mötley Crüe," Lee pointed out. "That’s understandable, but when you break it down, that record still sounds rad today."

Neil eventually reclaimed his role in the lineup, but Lee isn't alone among his bandmates in his fondness for the Corabi-fronted record. "I’ll probably get kicked in the nuts for this, but I thought it was a really great album," guitarist Mick Mars said years later. "It was a great step forward for us, a different style of music. I thought it was much heavier and much more. I don’t even know how to say it. The songs sounded more like songs. … I thought that album was fantastic."

Mars intends to renew his collaboration with Corabi after Mötley Crüe wraps up its final tour at the end of the year. "A lot of people already know about it, but as soon as he’s done doing this next tour, Mick and I have had some discussions about possibly going in and doing some writing together and doing a record, and maybe going out and doing some shows," Corabi recently revealed. "So we’ll see how that works."

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