Kiss has been working on their debut hologram show for 2027 and according to everyone involved, it's gonna melt your entire brain into a puddle. Or at least that's the vibe I've been getting.
Long story short, Kiss recently sold their music catalog, likeness and brand name to Pophouse, the Swedish company that also worked on the ABBA Voyage show. Kiss is done with traditional live shows but is working on some kind of hologram show for 2027.
According to Kiss guitarist Paul Stanley in an interview with Billboard, the 2027 show is "beyond anything that anyone else has contemplated. The whole idea, again, of doing a simulated concert is — that's the dark ages to us."
When asked how similar it'll be to what was previewed during their final show at Madison Square Garden, Stanley added: "Well, [that was] really was a double-edged sword, because I know that there were people who wanted to see or show what was going on behind the scenes, but quite honestly, it was in such an infancy and so far in the beginning that some of us had questions about showing it because it would give people an idea that that was what we were doing.
"And it's far, far, far from that. That was just an early — I don't wanna say rendering, but an early version of what is to come and is still being worked on. It bears little resemblance to what was there. What we were showing was just the inception of the idea that we can continue on outside of flesh and blood."
This isn't the first time that anyone in Kiss has promised great things from the show. Kiss frontman Gene Simmons said in a late 2023 Q&A session: "They're gonna get better, that animated stuff. There's so much being planned, even beyond my comprehension. But they're spending, oh, about 200 million [dollars] to take it to the next level."
Simmons later mentioned something similar during an April 2024 interview with TMZ, saying the show isn't just gonna be a bunch of holograms taking the proverbial stage and playing what amounts of a movie for the audience.
"It's not just, 'Okay, they're gonna show up on stage just like they did before, but it's holograms. No. That's an archaic term. Technology has advanced so far, you won't believe it.
"We spent some time at George Lucas's place and did motion capture stuff secretly. We didn't talk to anybody — media or anything — about it, because we wanted this to be like nothing anybody's ever seen. And I will tell you, if you've seen the ABBA show in London, which is phenomenal, this is gonna be beyond anything you've ever seen.
"So the future is here, and with our friends at Pophouse, who are visionaries, we're gonna be doing things that no band and no musical — nobody's ever done before. Our events are going to be multi, I wanna say multidimensional. You just won't believe your eyes. Things are gonna be so much larger than life in front of you. You won't believe it. We've already seen the first fragments of that. It's just jaw-droppingly amazing."
So yeah. These Kiss holograms better be amazing.
