(Brandon:) Europe rules (Patreon)

This is brandon of course - Europe is great if you can handle a little cheese with your 80s epic hair metal. The Final Countdown is indeed pretty annoying, and the band went off the rails (into popularity lol) at that point but they were actually quite a good bridge between hair metal/hard rock/epic/prog metal for their first two albums. Plus they wound up inspiring a lot of grittier swedish metal bands, which is worth it in itself.

So yeah, check out the song above from their first album for a teaser (if you're into this sort of thing). Here's a hot one from the second album (which has been covered by a lot of more extreme metal bands incidentally):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmyXkBCmqXI

I find a lot of folks only know the final countdown and thus discount their earlier stuff, so... here you go!