“I know it’s gonna sound crazy…” says Caleb Followill, staring NME dead in the eye with the kind of intensity that you suspect his father, a United Pentecostal Church preacher, may have once exuded, “but there was a moment, making this record, where I truly felt like I was the most inspired man in the world.”
We’re deep in the palatial suite of a five-star hotel in London’s super-swanky Mayfair and, along with his brother and Kings of Leon drummer Nathan, the singer spends an evangelistic hour regaling NME with a stadium-sized tale of growing pains, mega-fame, familial strife, breakdown, rebirth and creative rejuvenation. Oh, and ambition – gallons of ambition.
It begins in Australia, October 2022. “We hadn’t been in a while to that part of the world,” recalls Caleb, “and the crowds were awesome…. There was this feeling [of]: ‘We’re getting to a place in our career where people appreciate us. They’ve seen the rise and the fall. We’re normal, regular men in their eyes and they’re rootin’ for us.’”
As they crested that wave, though, they faced yet another plummet. “We ended that tour and it was our managers and people coming to us like: ‘Alright! It’s the 20-year anniversary of your first album, so shall we go out and….’” He mimes waving vacantly out on the nostalgia circuit. “It scared me… It pushed us to where we are right now: ‘We’re not ready to quit!’ I’m thinking about the future. I want to do something great again.”
This antipodean epiphany led to Kings of Leon’s ninth – ninth! – record, ‘Can We Please Have Fun’, which recaptures the raucous energy that the Nashville clan bottled in the early ‘00s. There are moments of introspection, as on the hazy ‘Actual Daydream’, but it’s the fuzzed-up likes of ‘Hesitation Generation’ and ‘Nothing To Do’ (the Kings’ first punk track? Discuss!) that feel like flares fired into the crowd of a ‘00s indie package show.
Album nine is a marked departure from its meditative predecessor, ‘When You See Yourself’, which stalled at Number 11 on the Billboard 200. This was the first time they’d not broken the top five since the release of 2008’s six-million-selling ‘Only By The Night’ (or The One With ‘Sex On Fire’ On, as it’s also known). In the aftermath, the band parted ways with their long-term label, RCA Records. The decision was “mutual”, Nathan insists.
“We had kind of reached the end of [the contract],” Caleb explains, “and maybe the label was like, ‘Well, alright, we’ve kind of had a good relationship…”
So Kings of Leon, one of the biggest, most bankable rock groups on the planet, became a hungry indie band again. The resulting album is as urgent, as fired-up, as the title suggests, which didn’t go unnoticed by their former paymasters. “That label did come back and did try to sign us after the album [was recorded],” the singer reveals with a sly grin. “Some labels started to sniff around, but the fact that we didn’t have that in the beginning was such a… man, it was a weight lifted.”
Before Capitol Records snapped up the album, this sense of freedom seeped into the songwriting. “I saw things in colours and shapes and sounds,” he says. “It was just like I was on a huge acid trip. For months!” The frontman was so plugged in during this period, it seems, that anything could be turned into art. “I’d see something on TV,” he marvels, “and go, ‘Ooh – I can apply that.’ And while it was happening, I was thinking: “Man, I wish other people could feel what I’m feeling right now.”
It was Christmas 2022, when all the presents were unwrapped and the new year yawned ahead, that Caleb sent the text: “Hey, let’s get together in January.”
The four-piece, rounded out by younger brother Jared on bass and their cousin Matthew on guitar, were about to go in search of their swagger. They wound up at Dark Horse, a recording studio in rural Franklin, Tennessee, a short drive from each of their homes. Given the surprises they pulled out of the bag there, the studio would also prove to be aptly named.
Caleb found the place in what sounds like a scene from a Coen brothers movie: “I took a drive out to Franklin, out to the middle of the country… I pulled up to this structure that ended up being the studio that we worked in. A guy came up and was like, ‘Can I help you’? I rolled down the window and he kinda looked at me and I saw that he recognised… I was like, ‘No, I’m just lookin’…’”
Unbeknownst to the Kings, their new home away from home was also an Airbnb. There were, Nathan recalls, “apartments below the studio”. There was a swing out in the yard, where the band would chance upon unsuspecting holidaymakers: “They’d go, ‘Oh, where y’all from…?’ ‘Uh… Nashville.’ They had no idea [who we were].”
As a long-time KOL fan, producer Kid Harpoon was rather more enamoured with the band. He quickly caught on to the freewheeling vibe, too. “There was a little pressure,” says Nathan, “like, ‘Oh, shit, we don’t have a label,’ but there was more freedom as far as knowing that this record isn’t gonna be finished and then you’re gonna have a couple guys in suits come sit down and be like, ‘That’s a single, that’s a single.’”
“Usually whatever the label likes,” Caleb adds, ruefully, “I’m like, ‘Oh, I hate that.’ A lot of times they’re right and it ends up being successful.”
What’s an example of that having happened in the past?
He pauses, then says with a sigh: “’Sex on Fire’. I didn’t want it on the album. But I knew it was…” He almost says the word “good”, but stops himself. “I knew it had potential, but I felt like there were other songs… I knew instantly: ‘Everyone’s gonna hear this and they’re not gonna listen to the rest of [the album].”
The song’s raunchy refrain was a dummy lyric that stuck, and the band’s relationship with their most famous song is notoriously fractured: they once dubbed it “a piece of shit”. Over the years, though, KOL have come to accept it’s what many people will always know them for. Better just to own it, says Nathan: “It’s kind of like a nickname. Someone gives you a nickname and you act like you hate it… you are stuck with that for the rest of your life. Ask our cousin, Nacho.”
It’s well-documented, too, that mainstream success almost destroyed the band. Their dynamic had already toxified when Caleb experienced an infamous onstage meltdown in Dallas in 2011 (he quit booze for nine months afterwards). At that time, did the brothers ever think they’d be so excited to make a record again?
“Had that not happened,” Nathan replies firmly, “we wouldn’t be sitting here.” Referring to their levels of happiness, he adds: “We were lucky enough to be here” – he gestures up to the sky – “start to see what it’s like here” – he lowers his hand – “and make the decision like, ‘Shit, do we wanna stay at this level for the rest of our lives?’”
It “takes time” to heal, says Caleb, who adds: “There’s years of kind of listening to whoever you wanna listen to to make you feel better about yourself. You can have a circle of friends who don’t wanna kick you while you’re down, so they don’t really put the mirror in your face and say: ‘Hey, man, you’re pretty close to fucking up a good thing here.’ And then it’s a personal journey. You eventually get to a point where you go, ‘Alright – what is my deal? What am I doing?’”
Kings of Leon have now stripped back the rock star clichés to such an extent that ‘Can We Please Have Fun’ was influenced by post-punk bands such as IDLES and Viagra Boys, as well as sonic pioneers Suicide. This return to the freneticism of their earlier years no doubt appealed to Kid Harpoon, whose friends, Nathan suspects, were telling the producer: “Their new shit sucks! We want the old stuff!”
Ultimately, though, Caleb aimed to impress people who appreciate the craft of songwriting. “With this record,” he explains, “I was like: ‘Alright, big boy, it’s time to be a songwriter… I wanted people to feel the passion that went into [this album] and the honest, blue-collar hard work. We live in Music City, where the man next to you in the grocery store could be wearin’ overalls and you have no idea that he wrote the biggest country song in history.”
It makes you think, doesn’t it, of those holidaymakers chatting to a family in a rural AirBnb, little realising they’d encountered one of the biggest rock bands in the world, their frontman’s veins surging with evangelical fervour. Or perhaps they had an inkling. After all, as Caleb says, wide-eyed, of album nine: “The vibrations were high.”
Kings Of Leon’s ‘Can We Please Have Fun’ is released May 10 on Capitol