Hits, headline slots, awards and inter-band fighting. Since their 2003 debut, Kings of Leon has soaked it all up, rocked out, and, at times enjoyed the royal treatment.
With the release at midnight of Can We Please Have Fun (via Capitol), KoL’s career goes nine albums deep.
The award-winning sibling act’s latest LP is led by the shaggy rocker single “Mustang,” which cracked the top 5 of Billboard’s Adult Alternative Airplay and Alternative Airplay charts.
“Our only rule is to not have any songs on the album that we would be embarrassed if they were a single — so we try to make the album great, because we don’t know anything about the business side of things or algorithms or which song will do well,” bandmate Jared Followill tells Billboard.
“Now,” he continues, “it seems like you just need a great 15-second piece of a song to make it big on TikTok — slow it down, reverb it, make it huge. But we don’t know what works anymore, and I don’t think anybody knows … You just have to play ball a little bit, and hope that you’re with the right people who know what they’re doing.”
After working with Markus Dravs on their last two full-lengths, including 2021’s When You See Yourself, the quartet tapped Kid Harpoon last year to guide the new effort.
The rockers — Caleb (guitar/vocals), Nathan (drums), Jared (bass) and Matthew Followill (guitar) — burst into the mainstream in the late 2000s with smashes “Use Somebody” and “Sex on Fire,” both from 2008’s Only By the Night; the former song won record of the year in 2010, one of their three career Grammys.
Along the way, they’ve collected three NME Awards, two Brit Awards, and one Juno, headlined major festivals around the globe, including Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits, and Glastonbury, and landed a No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 2016’s Walls, one of the band’s four top 10 appearances on the chart.
KoL hits the road this June for a world tour in support of Can We Please Have Fun. Produced by Live Nation in North America, the jaunt will visit 26 cities across the U.S. and Canada, starting Aug. 14 at Moody Center in Austin, TX.
Stream Can We Please Have Fun below.