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 be,” Followill explains. “We didn’t want bells and whistles. We didn’t want loud pedals and reverb and all the things that can make something sound better. We tried to avoid that. We just wanted the songs to shine.”
The result is an album that’s unlike anything else in Kings of Leon’s catalog. O My Beloved‘s songs are mostly mid-tempo and melody-forward, with an acoustic underpinning and careful nuances enhanced with strings, keyboards and hand percussion. Electric guitars — whether it’s the airy slides in “My Whole World,” the biting solo in “Cold Blue Dawn” or the soaring break in “Feel the Love” — embellish rather than the drive the tracks, making for an ambience that Followill says was wholly intentional in the process.
“Whatever we were playing, we wanted it to feel like a four-piece,” he notes. “At first we thought we were just making demos…but in the process, we would listen back and we were like, ‘I think this is better than demos.’” That, in turn, led to the decision for the band to produce O My Beloved itself.
“We felt like if we brought someone in, we were going to be fighting to make it sound like (it does), and we’re already getting there ourselves,” Followill explains. “We were just in our little paint factory, and the sounds we were getting were so authentic. We got to a place where it was like, ‘We don’t want anyone coming here. We want to do this ourselves. We want that challenge. We want to meet that opportunity.’ It was so freeing to have our own space and work on our own schedule and do things the way we wanted to do it.”
O My Beloved also takes a different lyrical bent — sentimental, philosophical and at times nostalgic, set off by occasional “threads of darkness” that represent the journey taken to the positive outlook that pushes through. At the same time, Kings of Leon end the album with Followill acknowledging “I think we still have a lot we’d like to learn” in “Get You Down.”
“I know we use the word gratitude a lot, but I don’t really know how else to describe it,” Followill says. “I felt like I was just looking back on our accomplishments, and outside of music — at our life and who we’ve become as men and fathers. There was a lot of appreciation and pride for that and the potential to continue doing what we do, because I feel like we’re at a place now where we love it more than we ever have.”
In addition to “My Whole World,” the group has advanced the album with the singles “KOYSAR” and “Cold Blue Dawn,” the latter accompanied by an inventive lyric video created with the Weather Channel using NASA satellite topography to spell out the words. The group will be in London for a show on Nov. 10 and Abu Dhabi on Dec. 3. Australia is on tap for February and Europe for the summer.
A just-announced North American tour begins May 8 in Bristow, Va., and runs into early June, with a second leg during September and October. (See dates below.) And Followill predicts that the approach the band took on O My Beloved will make an impact on the rest of Kings of Leon’s repertoire.
“I feel like we can break our show up,” he says, “and maybe there are stripped-down versions of songs or a stripped-down set within the set. We’re still kinda working on it and playing with some fun (ideas); any chance we get to expand our sound, or even the opposite, those little challenges are exciting to us. We’ve played a thousand concerts; at this point we just want to have fun with it but also give people a great show when they come out.”
Kings of Leon’s newly announced North American tour dates include:
May 8 – Bristow, VA – Jiffy Lube Live^
May 12 – Philadelphia, PA – TD Pavilion at Highmark Mann^
May 14 – Cuyahoga Falls, OH – Blossom Music Center^
May 15 – Noblesville, IN – Ruoff Music Center^
May 18 – Grand Rapids, MI – Acrisure Amphitheater^
May 23 – Clarkston, MI – Pine Knob Music Theatre^
May 25 – Bridgeport, CT – Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater^
May 27 – Saratoga Springs, NY – Albany Med Health System at SPAC^
May 29 – Bangor, ME – Maine Savings Amphitheater^
May 30 – Bethel, NY – Bethel Woods Center for the Arts^
June 2 – Toronto, ON – RBC Amphitheatre^
June 5 – Shakopee, MN – Mystic Lake Amphitheater^
June 6 – Tinley Park, IL – Credit Union 1 Amphitheatre^
Sept. 11 – West Valley City, UT – Utah First Credit Union Amphitheatre*
Sept. 14 – Vancouver, BC – Rogers Arena*
Sept. 15 – Seattle, WA – Climate Pledge Arena*
Sept. 17 – Mountain View, CA – Shoreline Amphitheatre*
Sept. 18 – Los Angeles, CA – The Kia Forum*
Sept. 20 – Morrison, CO – Red Rocks Amphitheatre*
Sept. 24 – Phoenix, AZ – Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre*
Sept. 26 – Austin, TX – Moody Center*
Sept. 28 – Fort Worth, TX – Ariat Arena*
Sept. 30 – Alpharetta, GA – Ameris Bank Amphitheatre^
Oct. 1 – Orlando, FL – Kia Center^
Oct. 3 – Raleigh, NC – Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek^
Oct. 6 – Charlotte, NC – Truliant Amphitheater^
Oct. 8 – Franklin, TN – FirstBank Amphitheater^
Oct. 12 – Cincinnati, OH – The Farmer Music Center*
Oct. 14 – Mansfield, MA – Xfinity Center*
Oct. 15 – New York, NY – Madison Square Garden*
^ With support from Band of Horses
* With support from Dexter and The Moonrocks
