How a Foot Injury & ‘Midlife Crisis’ Led to Kings of Leon’s ‘Therapeutic’ New Album ‘O My Beloved’
Categoria: Musica
"It felt like something that I had buried down and hadn't really addressed," frontman Caleb Followill tells Billboard.
Por Billboard | 06/11/2026
It was bad news when Kings of Leon frontman Caleb Followill broke his foot while playing tag with his children in spring 2025, forcing the group to cancel planned tour dates in the U.S. and Europe. But the incident also provided the first step toward O My Beloved , the Grammy-winning Nashville quartet’s 10th studio album, out Friday (Nov. 6) on the group’s own Love Tap Records — a gentler and more reflective 13-song set that’s the first to be produced by the band itself. “That foot injury was a midlife crisis kind of deal,” says Followill, who formed Kings of Leon with his brother, drummer Nathan Followill, in 1999 (they were joined three years later by brother Jared and cousin Matthew Followill). “At first it was a lot of self-pity and also guilt, ’cause I felt like I was letting everyone down. After a little bit of that, I did grab the guitar and I started to play and the first thing that came out of that ended up being ‘My Whole World,'” O My Beloved ‘s lead single. “It just felt different,” Followill tells Billboard over Zoom. “I didn’t feel like I was writing something that I was necessarily going to put out into the world; it just felt therapeutic, and it felt like something that I had buried down and hadn’t really addressed. So that song came very naturally and very quickly. I just kept writing and the songs that came after that all had that same feeling.” The tunes were decidedly not in the vein of most of the band’s catalog, including Billboard Hot 100 hits such as “Sex on Fire” and “Use Somebody,” even though Followill notes that “we have always had these moments on each of the albums where we bring it back to our roots, which is more songwriter-driven.” He expected that his new batch of material would be voted down and the troupe would go back to “the Kings of Leon thing which people expect to hear — the rock songs, the fast, up-tempo kind of stuff.” To his surprise, however, that wasn’t the case. “I was expecting to be met with a little hesitation, a little, ‘Let’s not try to switch up what people have come to expect,'” Followill recalls. “But it was the opposite. I feel like we’re all at the same place and we all felt like, ‘Yeah, it’s time to let the songs shine.’” Working in its Neon Leon studio in Nashville, Followill says the group’s approach was “to feel the room that we were recording in.” That included sounds from trains rolling through a station across the street, which seeped into the recordings. “There’s trains all over the album,” he confirms. “You can hear a lot of walls rattling, but I think that adds something. It feels like a reverb or something.” He notes there was no thought of scrubbing that from the tracks. “It’s not perfect, and we didn’t want it to