10 Perfect Power Pop Albums With No Bad Songs

9. Unmasked - KISS

The idea of KISS even doing a straight ahead power pop album just feels wrong. Since there's literally a guy in the band who's known to call himself a Demon, how are you supposed to get away with something that chipper coming out of his mouth? Well, what if I told you that KISS' music was never really that far away from power pop in the first place?

Even though they had some solid riffs that verged on the side of metal in some places, KISS were going to need something a bit easier to digest after losing some of their hardcore fans on the last album Dynasty. Switching back to the traditional guitar setup, Unmasked is a bit of a strange beast in the KISS catalog, having some radio ready hooks sandwiched between the kind of crunch that we already knew from them.

While there's definitely a lot of pop flavored tracks on here like Shandi, Ace Frehley really comes through on the power side of the description, delivering some amazing riffs that could give even Gene Simmons a run for his money at the time. This was not necessarily the bounceback that the band needed though, eventually culminating in Peter Criss being fired from the band after production wrapped up. These guys were always known to be cartoons in the real world though, and this is the closest that they've ever come to actually sounding like it.

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