For 50 years, KISS toured the world, sharing their music with fans of all ages. While their showmanship and radical costumes catapulted them to stardom, it also came with a great deal of backlash. Over the decades, the band battled countless rumors and calls for the group to be silenced. But no matter where the criticism came from, the group continued to perform. That was until 2023 when the band performed one last time. Although the end of an era, KISS revealed a new concert featuring avatar versions of themselves. And while some didn’t love the idea, Paul Stanley recently admitted to not stressing over the future.
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On December 2, 2023, KISS played their last song at New York’s Madison Square Garden. With thousands of fans in attendance, the band decided to give them a glimpse into the future. Before the avatars revealed themselves, Stanley announced, “The end of this road is the beginning of another road.”
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While Stanley wasn’t wrong about declaring a new beginning, fans shared their opinions on the idea of KISS avatars with some criticizing the idea. But that doesn’t bother the musician as he told Ultimate Classic Rock, “Quite honestly, many times in the last 50 years, people have scratched their heads about what our plans were. And nine out of 10 times they’ve been successful, and other people have followed. So that’s nothing really new.”
Paul Stanley Talks KISS Avatar Backlash at Madison Square Garden
Stanley admitted that given the success of KISS over the decades, the band is in a “unique position” to explore avenues that many bands can’t. “We’re in a fortunate position and a unique position of being a band that can do things that other bands can’t do. So to not explore and take advantage of many of them would be, I don’t know, ridiculous, and also, really, at this point, mystifying. We’ve worked this hard to create four icons, and a band that’s iconic in so many different ways, and to not diversify and maximize what we’ve created, we’d be crazy.”
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Scheduled to debut in 2027, Stanley promised that the KISS avatars would be entirely different than what the band showed at Madison Square Garden.
“One thing that’s interesting is people, I think, perhaps even understandably, got the wrong impression initially of the avatars,” Stanley said. “Because at the Garden shows, we wanted to give people a glimpse of some of the things, or one of the things, that’s to come. But the avatars are really in their infancy. They’re far from where they’ll end up in terms of look and purpose.”
Although fans will have to wait three years to see the finished product, Stanley insisted, “I think that any confusion will be put to rest.”
(Photo by Monica Schipper/Getty Images)
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