The 40 Best KISS Songs of All Time

Like the Cadillac and Coca Cola, KISS are a great American icon (or four great American icons, if you prefer). These stackheeled superheroes busted out of the New York club scene to build the greatest empire music has ever seen.

You could listen to their albums while eating from the KISS lunchbox, playing the KISS pinball machine or, thanks to the KISS condom, getting your Uh! All Night on. And then when it’s all done, there’s the KISS coffin to carry you away to the great Firehouse in the sky.

But as Gene Simmons himself admits, all of that would have been nothing without the music. KISS aren’t the cleverest or most sophisticated band around. They’re not reinventing the wheel or changing the world or winning any prizes for poetry. But the songs they’ve written since they exploded into life back in the multi-coloured swirl of the early 70s stand among the greatest songs in the history of rock’n’roll, anthems of love, lust, rebellion and rock’n’roll that have soundtracked millions of lives the world over.

As KISS complete their final farewell lap around the world, we present the 40 finest songs KISS ever committed to tape, as voted for by fans.

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40. War Machine (Creatures Of The Night, 1982)
One of the heaviest tracks Kiss have recorded was, surprisingly, co-written by Gene Simmons, Bryan Adams and Adams’s writing partner Jim Vallance. Also surprising is the fact that Simmons came up with the bones of the song while tinkering on a cheap miniature synthesiser. Bombastic, powerful and badass, The Demon’s foreboding vocals on War Machine are full of scowling menace.

39. Tomorrow (Unmasked, 1980)
The first Kiss album to rely largely on the help of outside songwriting talent, Paul Stanley has dismissed 1980’s Unmasked as “a pretty crappy album”, but there is one track on the record that he still loves. “Tomorrow is a really great song,” he says. He’s right – it’s a pop-rock classic, and the hit that never was.

38. Forever (Hot In The Shade, 1989)
Although the 1989 album Hot In The Shade is now all but forgotten, this masterful, acoustic-based power ballad was a Top 10 hit in the US. One of Kiss' more mournful lighters-in-the-air moments, this song makes all the more sense when you learn Paul wrote it with the king of power ballads – and of bad hair – Michael Bolton.

37. Unholy (Revenge, 1992)
A Simmons and Vinnie Vincent co-write – despite the fact that Vincent had been fired from Kiss eight years previously – Unholy signalled the return of a hard-hitting, foot-stomping Kiss.

Gene Simmons: “I got the idea for Unholy from a song that [Kiss collaborator] Adam Mitchell wrote that Doro Pesch recorded called Unholy Love. I just loved the word ‘unholy’. Vinnie Vincent and I wrote the lyric

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