Soundtrack albums in the 80s and 90s — ones that didn’t feature an instrumental score — generally followed a similar template. If your music budget had any money, you’d try to spend it on one or two big names with the hope of scoring a hit which would help promote the movie (the bigger the budget, the more “name” artists you could have). Invariably, there would be a cover or two, and then, in order to cut costs, the rest of the soundtrack might feature a couple of oldies and then filler by artists the general public had likely never heard of and would not ever see again.

This model worked in favor of everybody. The movie got relatively cheap licensing and at the same time record labels could promote lesser-known acts for free. If the movie was a hit, it could result in millions of people hearing their artist.

1985’s Girls Just Want To Have Fun, a teen-oriented movie starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt as Catholic schoolgirls secretly trying to get cast as dancers on a television show, had only a modest budget. And only a small portion of that budget was dedicated to the music. They couldn’t even afford one big name. In fact, a couple of the artists who appeared on the soundtrack had never even released anything at all.

The movie primarily featured pop songs, but they needed a rock song for one scene and they chose one that rocked surprisingly hard for a teen movie aimed at a pop audience.

Metal band Holland formed in Chicago in 1984 — named after lead singer Tom Holland — and released one album on Atlantic in 1985. Their song “Wake Up The Neighborhood” plays over a scene of punk party-crashers wreaking havoc at a country club debutante ball. It’s utterly ridiculous in a way that only the 80s could be. But the song slaps and it’s unfortunate Atlantic didn’t choose to release it as a single (likely because the guitar was too metal for radio at the time), instead choosing a perfectly cromulent but relatively mundane song — which flopped — as the band’s sole single for the label. Given the chance, “Wake Up The Neighborhood” might have been able to do what its title instructed.

Girls Just Want To Have Fun wasn’t a box office success, but it had a long life on cable and became a cult classic of sorts. Alas, Holland wasn’t able to capitalize on the exposure and broke up in 1986.