Kings of Leon’s New Disc Due in October
Kings of Leon will release their fifth album Come Around Sundown, the follow-up to their breakthrough LP Only By the Night, on October 19th. The 13-track disc was recorded in New York with producers Angelo Petraglia and Jacquire King. On their current North America tour, the band has been giving fans a preview of their new material, performing new tracks tentatively titled “Mary,” “Radioactive,” “Immortals” and “Southbound.”
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“The ones we’ve been playing on tour, man, they’ve been going over very well. A lot better than we thought they would. Some of them get better reactions than the older songs, which is bittersweet,” drummer Nathan Followill told Rolling Stone last week during a press conference for the Outside Lands Festival, which the band will headline on August 15th. “It’s great to see that they’re digging the direction that we’re heading on this record. It’s fun to play them live, because not only are we kind of figuring them out ourselves because they were some of the last ones we recorded, but it’s also great to be able to throw something in there that you haven’t played a gazillion times. It’ll be great when we can play the whole record. It’s taken a lot of self-discipline to not get up there and not play eight or 10 of them.”
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After flirting with stardom with their first three albums, Kings of Leon finally broke through with Only By the Night, thanks to three huge singles: “Sex on Fire,” “Use Somebody” and “Notion.” “Use Somebody” also won the Kings three Grammy Awards in the Record of the Year, Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance by a Group with Vocal categories. The Followills also landed on their first cover of Rolling Stone.
Kings of Leon were recently the victims of one of the more comical concert mishaps in rock history: pigeon excrement rained down on bassist Jared Followill during a show in St. Louis, forcing the band to exit the stage four songs into their set. “We’re actually we’re working with a company for a pigeon repellent spray that we can use for future shows,” Followill joked last week. “It’s one of those things that happened and looking back on it now, it’s a lot funnier than it was at the time. Hopefully pigeon gate can officially be put to rest.”