


As the new album’s cover art suggests, they’re ready to hit the forward button. The brothers insist that they’ve put their differences and dependencies aside and are ready to be your favorite band again. And if Come Around Sundown was a deliberate attempt to ease away from chart-ready “Be Somebody”-style anthems, KOL had two tour-free years to piece together a new musical and commercial scheme while under mounting pressure to stage a comeback.īut that’s all just mechanical bull. Unlike the making of their last album, this time they’ve had time to think about the kind of band they’d like to return as. So now Mechanical Bull marks the return of Kings of Leon, for which they attempt to prove they are a healthy, functioning band that can make a record that appeals to one of their fanbases and perhaps both. Finally, in July 2011, singer Caleb pulled out his rock-star meltdown move by bailing midway through a Dallas concert, after which the rest of the tour was scrapped. The arguing, the criticism, the booze, and the birdshit all started to close in. Stories, and eventual videotape, surfaced depicting the band straining over frequent bickering. They wrote and recorded a new record (2010’s Come Around Sundown) without bothering to stop touring, a pace that did nothing to boost their mental or emotional health. The boys toured for two years as one of the biggest bands on the planet, watching the money roll in, and tweeting continually about how much booze they were throwing back. Still, the brothers protested the sell-out label, claiming, for instance, that they’d turned down offers from Glee, insisting, as Jared did, “We could have sold out so much more!”Įveryone knows what happened next. However, the Followills themselves acknowledged that for every fan they alienated with any change in their sound or personal grooming, they gained five others, a sentiment that didn’t sit well with those original fans. Their old fans, angry that their Kings discovered razors and hit radio, vowed to skip KOL’s first headlining slot at Bonnaroo. The band’s two fanbases are, in fact, almost completely mutually exclusive. That is, Greek Row, Taylor Swift, your sister-in-law, and the legions who discovered the Kings after “Sex on Fire” blew up.

With songs about drug benders and transvestites, the Kings were raw and weird and hirsute enough to remain off the radar of mainstream audiences and to therefore retain the approval of integrity watchdogs.
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The first group: poorly-shaved indie and jam purists who fell for the Followills first three albums - an unruly mix of Southern twang and third-generation mod rock. The boys were suddenly enormous, headlining the major festivals, selling out arenas, and going platinum in a dozen countries.
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But then came, Only By the Night in 2008, an album of more polished songcraft and arrangements, full of soaring anthems, including a pair global smashes, “Sex on Fire” and “Use Somebody”. After all, the Followills spent years passing on opportunities to “sell out”, presumably by refusing to compromise their scruffy indie integrity for instance, in 2007, just as their stock was ready to explode, they took a left turn by releasing Because of the Times, their noisiest, most-expansive album to date.

Every seat in the house, every time we play.” Then-bassist Jason Newsted offered a candid response to those charges: “Yes, we sell out. In the ’90s, after Metallica’s Black Album led to an explosion in Metallica’s mainstream popularity, the band was met with the obligatory accusations of selling out.
