Jailbreak is the sixth studio album by Irish hard rock band Thin Lizzy.

[1] After their previous two albums, Nightlife and Fighting, failed to generate sales, Thin Lizzy were given one last chance by their label, Vertigo Records.

However, guitarists Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson felt that the speed at which it was completed adversely affected its quality.

[2] "When I wrote 'Warriors'…" frontman and songwriter Phil Lynott remarked in 1976, "the only way I could give any sense of heavy drug takers was by describing them as warriors; that they actually go out and do it.

[4] Robertson was against the idea, as he liked the song as it had originally been arranged, in a blues format with his own additions of piano and bottleneck guitar.

Scott Gorham also revealed that "Romeo and the Lonely Girl" was also brought up as an option for a single, but was ultimately discarded, as "nobody was overexcited about it.

[4] Village Voice critic Robert Christgau likened the album's songs to Bruce Springsteen cast-offs, finding Lynott's lyrical ideas "boring" and Gorham's guitar lines "second-hand".

"[8] In a retrospective assessment for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine describes Jailbreak as a "truly exceptional album", with "a dimension of richness that sustains, but there's such kinetic energy to the band that it still sounds immediate no matter how many times it's played".

[6] In his review Martin Popoff described Jailbreak as "the band's last album where eclecticism outweighs the cohesive signals" which made later releases "much more singular in intent".

He praised "Gorham and Robertson's sharpest metal to date" and remarked how the album is made of "a coterie of songs that very often struck the same emotional heartstrings of Springsteen.