10 Biggest Sophomore Slumps In Music History

For your average member of the KISS Army, pretty much any of the band's material before Alive! contains some of the greatest songs that they would ever write. Before the lush production of albums like Destroyer came seeping in, this was the sound of early hard rock at its most radio friendly, with songs like Deuce and Strutter becoming staples of the band's live set for generations. Hotter than Hell can join those ranks too...were it not for some of the worst production ever.

Being the first product that these shock rockers made outside of their hometown of New York, the mixing on this album is pretty questionable from the moment it starts. Whereas their debut had a crisp sound informed by the glam scene going on at the same time, everything feels so compressed on here that it's actually difficult to make out what they're playing half the time.

While you can definitely see that they were trying to make it sound much more macabre than it actually was, it just comes off like the audio engineer buried the entire mix with bass sounds and hoped for the best. Hell, it's practically a miracle that half of these songs got the real star treatment on Alive!. Although the songs are great, no classic can overcome this kind of production value.