O My Beloved

For the last 15 years, Kings of Leon have been victims of their own success. After several satisfactory albums of pre-distressed garage rock, the Followill family broke huge with 2008’s arena-rock gesture Only By the Night, an album that went double-platinum (back when that meant something, no less) and yielded a Billboard Top 10 smash so terrible that it won three Grammys. A New York Times profile from 2010 chronicled the band’s anxious attempts to scale back its sound while making that year’s Come Around Sundown, capturing the quartet in an identity crisis of their own making.

“I didn’t want it to have the big epic sound that people would expect from us,” frontman Caleb Followill admitted while discussing the record’s genesis. “We were not at all trying to do that.” They did it anyway—and then they did it again, and again, and again. By the time 2021’s When You See Yourself lumbered into view, Kings of Leon had completely shed the “Southern Strokes” tag that had been questionably affixed to them in the early 2000s, instead becoming a country-air-fried Imagine Dragons. They sounded weightless, gaseous, and exhausted.

Despite boardswork from lido-deck connoisseur Kid Harpoon, 2024’s Can We Please Have Fun stayed true to its title with tunes that felt airier and more unburdened than the decade-plus of Glastonbury-bait that preceded it. But nothing on that slight return-to-form signified the massive change that Kings of Leon have undergone on their 10th album, O My Beloved. Embracing a spacious and warm variant of country-rock that’s at turns crunchy and uncommonly pretty, the entire affair—self-produced with assistance from sometime-collaborator and former Stills member Liam O’Neill—is a largely impressive reinvention that’s also the loosest Kings of Leon have sounded in decades.

If it weren’t for Caleb’s distinctive mid-register Tennessee drawl, one would be forgiven for thinking these 13 songs came from a different band entirely. The hard sonic pivot on O My Beloved is immediately reminiscent of similar shrewd shifts that Kings of Leon’s presumptive peers have undergone during the 2020s. Mumford & Sons’ surprisingly pleasing and Dessner-ified Prizefighter from earlier this year comes to mind, as does the Killers’ energizing turn towards War on Drugs-isms on 2020’s big-screen Americana trip Imploding the Mirage.

But the most curious recollection triggered by O My Beloved’s often-sparse and acoustic-led tunes is Kings of Leon themselves—specifically, the lovely “Talihina Sky,” the closing track and sole outlier on 2003’s otherwise shit-kicking album Youth and Young Manhood. The group’s recent collaborations with bro-choice emo-country superstar Zach Bryan certainly nudged them further in this new direction; the moonlit “Pretty Thing” is reminiscent of Bryan’s most intimate work, while Caleb’s vocals are positively buttery on “Feel the Love,” accentuated by a just-right dosage of six-stringed squiggling supplied by cousin Matthew.

The front-porch and (current-gen indie-blasphemy alert) Hovvdy-ish vibes are indeed high across O My Beloved’s casually romantic chassis—but Kings of Leon are still prone to occasionally rocking out, for better or worse. “Make It Count” takes the shape of a slowly unfolding barnburner while retaining a small-scale charm, and “Count It Down” has an alt-country shagginess that would fit nicely alongside the pack-a-day sonic trend ruling present-day indie rock. But the plodding “Warm Company” feels dirge-like compared to what surrounds it; the cresting and very “Use Somebody”-esque chorus of “Blue Jeans and Diamonds” undermines its own orchestral tenderness via the specter of Kings of Leon’s late-2000s sound.

Old habits may die hard, but the temptation to afford the Followills a bit of grace during O My Beloved’s lower points remains strong. Despite the relative quality of their output across the last decade and a half, they’ve remained an enormously successful band amid the ebbs and flows of modern rock; if they chose to stay the course, few would bat an eyelash. Instead, Kings of Leon are revitalized with a new and rich maturity on O My Beloved, and for the first time in forever, they’ve become an entity to ignore at your own risk.