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Neon Nights is the second album from this Austrian band that plays '80s-influenced metal, as you might gather from the cover, which features a simple yet effective logo and some retro artwork. The first thing that jumped out at me was the guitar tone, which is sharp and refreshingly not downtuned. It's a sound many bands employed when the scene was first starting to gain attention beyond metal circles in the mid-80s, but isn't heard much today. Their songwriting walks the line between heaviness and commercial appeal pretty well, never flattening you with an all-out sonic assault but never drifting into the "sellout" territory that sucked in many a promising act back in the day. Songs like "Don't Give a Shit" and "Further on Through the Night" have catchy choruses and riffs that rattle around in your head even after the songs have ended and the whole of Neon Nights is pretty solid, even the ballad ("Streetlight Dream"). By today's standards, Küenring's music can be said to have a bit of hard rock in the mix, but I compare it to albums like Scorpions' Blackout, Dokken's Tooth and Nail and W.A.S.P.'s The Last Command that were regarded as plenty heavy when they were released, only viewed as more hard rock/commercial with the arrival of thrash and more extreme forms of metal later in the '80s. If you want a slab of catchy, unpretentious heavy metal that oozes the '80s, grab a copy of Neon Nights.