On Aug. 19, 2009, Paul Stanley proved he was done playing games with “Modern Day Delilah,” the first new Kiss song in 11 years.
The band’s founding frontman only agreed to end the decade-plus studio hiatus that followed the release of 1998’s in-name-only original lineup “reunion” album Pyscho Circus after setting some important ground rules: no more disco, concept album or grunge trend-chasing, no ballads and no outside songwriters or producers.
“I was through second-guessing or being second-guessed,” Stanley declared in his 2014 biography Face the Music: A Life Exposed. “At least if we did something I loved, there would be one big fan regardless of what happened.”
The resulting album, 2009’s Sonic Boom, was the first to feature Kiss’ final lineup, which would eventually go on to become its longest-lasting lineup: Stanley, co-founding bassist Gene Simmons, drummer Eric Singer, who joined for the third and final time in 2004, and lead guitarist Tommy Thayer, who had been performing with the group since 2002.
The band’s never been better,” Stanley declared to Noisecreep in 2009. “It really seems like a time where we could actually – if we put our minds to it – put something together that would be definitive and that we could be proud of.”
They hit that mark squarely with the lead single, “Modern Day Delilah,” an infectious stadium-rattler with an oversized Led Zeppelin-styled riff and a scorching hot solo from Thayer. After showing Godzilla-sized versions of the band stomping around New York City a la the Rolling Stones‘ “Love is Strong,” the song’s video packed all of the explosions and stunts of Kiss’ two-hour stage show into four frenzied minutes. The single just missed the Top 10 of Billboard’s rock airplay chart, peaking at No. 11, but that success helped propel Sonic Boom to the No. 2 spot on the Billboard albums chart, a career high for Kiss.
Kiss’ return to the studio was rather short-lived. Although they kept touring until 2023, three years after Sonic Boom, they released their final album, 2012’s Monster. “[It] just became a bit frustrating, in terms of working hard to do a great album and having it kind of glossed over because somebody, understandably, wants to hear ‘Love Gun,'” Stanley told UCR in 2024. “I get it. But judging some of the newer material on its own merits, it was and is as good. The great stuff from the last two albums, I’d say, is as good as anything we’d done. At that point, it just became clear that if it’s not fun, it’s not worth doing.”