Paul Stanley's Five Favorite KISS Albums, Ranked

Paul Stanley ranked his five favorite KISS albums during a recent interview on the Broken Record podcast.

KISS have a pretty vast discography, including 20 full-length studio albums and 13 live albums. Their debut self-titled album came out in 1974, and their final studio release, Monster, was released in 2012.

During the interview, Stanley chose his five favorite KISS albums, ranked them and explained his choices. Two of the five were live albums.

READ MORE: Pop Star Set to Play Paul Stanley in Upcoming KISS Movie

See his selections, ranked from worst to best, below.

'KISS Unplugged' (1996)

MTV launched its Unplugged series in 1989, and it was a huge hit throughout the 1990s. KISS appeared on the show in 1995, and they taped the performance and shared it as the KISS Unplugged live album the following year. There are a total of 16 tracks on the album.

"The band at that point was just on fire," Stanley recalled. "No effects, no amplifiers, no running around — us with guitars and drums and singing our asses off. And also it gave a chance to showcase the songs, because I've always adhered to the idea that a good song can be played on one guitar."

'Rock and Roll Over' (1976)

Rock and Roll Over is KISS' fifth studio album, and was released in November of 1976. It was the second-highest charting KISS album at the time, tied with its predecessor Destroyer at No. 11, and featured the hits "Calling Dr. Love" and "Hard Luck Woman."

"It doesn't sound anywhere near what we sounded like," Stanley asserted. "It was very elusive for us, perhaps because of some of the people we were working with. It just escaped us. We did something with real focus and clarity of what we were doing, so that's really good."

'Sonic Boom' (2009)

Sonic Boom was KISS' first 21st century album, as their previous release Psycho Circus came out in 1998. It would ultimately serve as their second-to-last studio album. "Modern Day Delilah," "Never Enough" and "Say Yeah" were the singles it spawned.

"Sonic Boom was a great album by a band that recognized its roots and recognized where it came from and picked up the slack and kept moving forward. I love that album, and I love the spirit that went into it, where everybody knew what they wanted to do, and at our best," Stanley reasoned.

He further argued that "Modern Day Delilah" would be considered a "classic" if it had been included on an older album, such as Rock and Roll Over, but it simply doesn't have the nostalgic aspect that their older songs do.

'Destroyer' (1976)

Destroyed is KISS' third studio album and features some of their biggest hits — "Detroit Rock City" and "Shout It Out Loud" in particular. It peaked at No. 11 in the U.S., making it the highest-charting KISS album at the time. Its successor, Rock and Roll Over, tied its chart position.

"Destroyer', even though it didn't sound much like its predecessors, but working with Bob Ezrin was such a education, such a schooling, discipline and upping the writing and putting aside at least temporarily all the songs about sleeping with this one or this group of your parties, and it raised the bar. So many of those songs wound up in our show up until the very end," Stanley explained.

'Alive!' (1975)

Alive! was the first live album KISS put out back in '75. It features 16 songs that were recorded during different concerts in Detroit, Michigan; Cleveland, Ohio; Wildwood, New Jersey; and Davenport, Iowa that year.

"We wanted an album that immersed you, immersion in the experience, which means being surrounded by people, which means bombs going off that are deafening, which means fixing any mistakes or a broken string," Stanley described of the album.

"Snobs or purists may have looked down their nose at that idea, but the truth is that album is still considered, if not the greatest, one of the greatest, and in a lot of circles greatest live album ever. Not because everything was live, but because it captured the live experience."