The ramshackle brilliance of sophomore album “Aha Shake Heartbreak” (2004) completed a two-record volley of critically acclaimed garage rock that Jared believes was only possible thanks to the patience of their longtime label, RCA Records. and Europe came flocking, turning them into cult stars. Amid Caleb’s scat-like yelps, lyrics charted brothel scrapes (“Molly’s Chambers”) and warnings of religious comeuppance (“Holy Roller Novocaine”) within their southern-fried tunes.Īudiences in the U.K. With their long hair and tight tees, the Nashville rockers looked like they’d been cryogenically frozen from the 1970s and dropped into the new century. They seemed to be something out of a bygone era themselves with a backstory almost too tantalizing to be swallowed as gospel truth.ĭrummer Nathan, Caleb and Jared Followill are the sons of a Pentecostal preacher from the American Deep South, who enlisted their cousin, Matthew Followill, to play lead guitar.
It’s certainly a different world to the one Kings of Leon greeted with their boisterous debut, “Youth and Young Manhood,” in 2003. In this day and age, I wish it didn’t have to. That isn’t something that came into our minds at all. “I don’t think any of us realized that this album didn’t have many songs that would fit the radio format. “The longer you’re doing this, the more you want to take things as far as you feel like they should go,” Caleb observes. But no such concerns influenced the music the band recorded. “When You See Yourself” has become the first release by a major rock band to be offered as an ‘NFT’ (Non-Fungible Token) - a form of non-duplicable digital token that denotes rights of ownership of the artist’s work to the purchaser. “Don’t think about the live show, don’t think about radio, don’t think about singles,” Jared recalls, “ try to make the best album you can.” For their eighth album, “When You See Yourself,” Kings of Leon entered the studio and discarded the notions that usually preoccupied them. This time around, however, it was different. They were also so intent on ensuring that the live performances were as good as the album experience that they would only record what the four of them “could play live.”
“We had a ton of rules at the very beginning,” shares his brother and bassist Jared Followill, who says the band used to “frown” at the idea of using instrumentation that strayed from their original sound. “We’ll argue with the record label later if we don’t have the radio hit,” frontman and principal songwriter Caleb Followill tells Variety. Nearly two decades into their recorded career, Kings of Leon are a band now willing to let go of commercial concerns. Sometimes you have to cut loose from the shackles of self-perception to really be free.
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