Kings of Leon Turn to Stripped-Down Sound on New Album 'O My Beloved'

Kings of Leon will return this fall with a new album that marks a sonic shift for the four-time Grammy-winning band. "O My Beloved," a 13-track record, arrives Nov. 6, with the first single, "My Whole World," released Thursday.

The change in direction traces back to an accident. Frontman Caleb Followill was working on new music last spring and preparing to join his bandmates on a European tour when he broke his foot playing tag with his children one night before bed. He recalled trying to hurdle a couch to make what he called an epic tag, only to catch his foot and fall. "It was a gnarly, gnarly break," he said.

After a few days of feeling he had let everyone down, Followill picked up a guitar. What emerged was stripped bare, closer to the music he and his drummer brother Nathan had written before Kings of Leon took shape. The four or five electric-leaning songs the band had been exploring were set aside, replaced by a clutch of new tunes that are more melancholic than bombastic, centered on gratitude and family.

"The songs just took on a different meaning, and so all the songs that we had been working on, they no longer were as attractive to me," Followill said. "I feel like just the whole temperature changed around us. And we realized that we're going to make something a little more significant."

The rest of the band adjusted course as well. "I'm happy with the direction," Nathan Followill said. "I think it might be my kids' favorite record."

"My Whole World" took shape after the accident, as Caleb Followill's family prepared for a cruise and he noticed a countdown on the wall. The song is a scene of domestic contentment, with references to peanut butter pie, a pin oak tree and tossing a football while babies coo. Its video features old home footage of the band members growing up, including Christmas mornings, swimming holes and moments of horseplay.

Followill said he was nervous to play the acoustic-led song for the others, partly because he did not normally play guitar that way and because the lyrics moved him. "I wasn't in control of it. The words were just coming out," he said, adding that he thought of his mother's death and feelings he had set aside while being a busy father and musician for a quarter century.

"We have already surpassed anything we ever imagined we could do and we've built something that's so beautiful," he said. "So, as opposed to having a 25-year anniversary where we kind of put out the greatest hits or something, I thought, wouldn't it be beautiful to make an album that is looking back on all of the things that we've done and appreciating how we got here?"

Bassist Jared Followill said the band felt free to explore the new direction because the album was the first they would produce themselves. "The songs just really started to pile up one after another and it became apparent that there could be something there and let's just dive in," he said. "No hesitation from us."

Among the album's highlights is the laid-back "KOYSAR," short for "Kick Off Your Shoes and Run," which draws on Caleb Followill's childhood memories of playing with his siblings to inspire his own children. "All I could picture was our childhood, running through sprinklers and my kids and those little simple moments," he said. "You're always trying to teach your kids something, and I feel the best way to do that is through your experience and through the mistakes that you've made and how you've gotten to where you are."

On "Such a Pretty Thing," he writes tenderly about a high school sweetheart. "That was the kind of songs that we wanted to write, and then we started the band and kind of went a different direction. But on this album, I feel like we kind of got back to that," he said. "We finally got to do it on album 10."

The title track is unconventional: a brief, lo-fi musical interlude captured on a smartphone outside the band's Nashville studio in wet, cold weather, with the sound of a passing train. "It turned out really, really cool and so we kept it," Jared Followill said.