I don’t know if it should be cause for celebration when, in making a new album, a band takes a retrograde step thirty years deep.

Kiss have done that with Sonic Boom, and we at ltd are celebrating anyway, because this is the band’s best album since, at least, 1982’s Creatures of the Night and, possibly, 1977’s Love Gun.

Frankly, we don’t care that this could have been the New Yorkers in the mid 70s. We don’t care that the album does not sit in the same contemporary, fashionably introspective milieu as Paul Stanley’s recent solo album Live to Win. It doesn’t matter that there are two new blokes dressed up as Peter and Ace (especially as guitarist Tommy Thayer sounds exactly like Frehley in his pomp).

We don’t even care that, if anything, Gene Simmons’s knuckle-dragging, antediluvian, single entendre lyrics have become even worse over the decades. What we do like is that here are 11 pop metal stompers, utterly devoid of pretension or anything that might be mistaken for good taste, with at least three songs, ‘Say Yeah’, ‘All For The Glory’ and ‘Stand’ destined to become big, cheesy, lighters-out stadium staples. Gloriously dumb.

Richard Hodkinson