Destroyer, 1976

May 02, 2026

When I was five years old, I convinced my mother to buy me an album solely based on the cover art. Of course I’d heard of Kiss—they were inescapable in 1977—but I hadn’t actually heard their music. They weren’t on my radio or TV, and we didn’t own any of their records. And I was too young to have friends with real record collections. So to five-year-old me, Kiss was a logo first, and some guys in make-up and costumes second.

At the time I watched a lot of Sesame Street and The Electric Company—both shows with real people, not animations. I didn’t get into cartoons until later, and I was never into comics. So I’m not sure exactly what hit me so hard when I saw Kiss’ album Destroyer sitting on the UMass Amherst bookstore shelf that day.

But I remember how it felt: like I had to have it. Like the world might have ended if my mother hadn’t agreed to buy it. I imagined that, like its cover, Destroyer sounded scary, heavy, and dark. My musical vocabulary was pretty limited at the time, but I’d listened to a ton of music — enough that, looking back, I wonder: if I’d heard the music before seeing the album, would I have still been interested in it? Thankfully the cover grabbed me first.

I wrote about that day in My Life in the Sunshine:

At home, I played the record over and over. I studied every inch of the record’s colorful jacket, memorizing details like the fan club’s New York City mailing address. I read the tiny text on the record’s circular label, which featured the word Casablanca in neon-like letters — the same label I later saw on my Village People record.

Does this happen now? Can it? It’s so much more likely that our first encounter with music is hearing it—our interest piqued by a familiar voice, an intriguing lyric, or an undeniable riff. That’s probably a callback to a century ago, when recorded music first existed and radio was the primary mode of discovery—when records came package in protective brown paper sleeves. It wasn’t until 1938 that Columbia Records’ 23-year-old art director Alex Steinweiss produced the first album cover art: a photo of a theatre marquee on a Rodgers & Hart album.

By the time I walked that Umass bookstore aisle, record covers had become as important as the music itself—a way to include a photo of the artist, or some other image that represented the music. Something that might grab a kid’s attention on a record store shelf.

In the case of Destroyer, the cover was by fantasy artist Ken Kelly, and it was a bit of a left turn for a band that had already produced three strong studio album covers. But the Destroyer art added something more—and with the album turning 50 this year, I’ve been thinking about why it still holds such a grip on me.

It’s the first Kiss album cover that feels like it means something beyond the band’s image: it conveys what I now know about that time in their history. Their first three albums didn’t do well, their label was about to go under, and Alive! was a last-gasp effort—a live album that somehow became a hit and changed the band’s trajectory. Destroyer was their first album as a successful band, and everything about the cover conveys that—from the fake muscles, to Gene’s fuck-you grin, to the band posed as super heroes standing on top of the world.

And of course there’s the music, which now stands out as more grandiose than the band’s first three straight-ahead rock albums. Strings, choirs, and the Peter Criss-sung piano ballad frame Destroyer as a giant leap for the band. But at its core it still has the best rock songs—from the opening swing of “Detroit Rock City“ to the pre-grunge dirge of “God of Thunder“ to the power-pop shine of “Shout It Out Loud.” Everyone gets a chance on the mic except guitarist Ace Frehley, who was supposedly going through a hard time and missed some of the recording sessions (and who arguably made the only great Kiss solo album two years later).

But I’m convinced that, had I not seen Destroyer on that shelf when I was five, it may never have hit me the way it did. The music delivered on every promise the cover made—and despite how non-threatening and sometimes just plain funny I find it all now, I still get a chill every time I see that cover.

On May 15, I’ll release Anthem for Peace, the new album by my uncle Alan Braufman. We recorded it in November 2025 with an all-star band in Brooklyn, and released this live video for “In Motion.”

My podcast, Identified is on break until we jump into Season 3. In the meantime, you can catch up on the first 40-ish episodes on YouTube and all podcast platforms.