Kings Of Leon’s new album is inspired by New Zealand

Culture and entertainment writer·NZ Herald·

12 May, 2024 10:11 PM6 mins to read

Kings of Leon are back with a new album. Photo / Supplied

With a new album, Can We Please Have Fun, out now, Kings of Leon tell Karl Puschmann how Kiwi audiences lit a creative fuse for the Grammy-winning band.

It’s fair to say Caleb and Jared Followill are uncharacteristically jazzed. The Kings of Leon frontman and his bassist brother are talking about the band’s new album, Can We Please Have Fun, with an enthusiasm unseen from the rock faves in many a year.

“We’re not always this way,” Caleb admits. “This one feels different. I think that’s because of the way that we made it. We all got on the same page. We locked ourselves away and knew what we wanted to do and didn’t stop until we got there. For us, this feels more special than things that we may have done in the past because we fully committed to it.”

Aotearoa, it turns out, played no small part in reigniting the fire under the band. Covid forced them to postpone their 2021 show, but they were able to play Spark Arena in 2022. It was the band’s first show here in 13 years and, as one of the first big internationals to visit after the lockdown, demand to see the group — and for live music in general — was so pent up, they needed to add a second show.

“The last tour when we went down there was very, very arguably, and I can almost say with certainty, my favourite tour we’ve ever done,” Caleb says, unprompted when he finds out I’m from New Zealand. “It was just so awesome. And specifically, New Zealand, that audience. I don’t know why we didn’t know what to expect. I guess we just forgot because it had been so long. But all of us left and were like, ‘What was that? Were we expecting that’?”

He laughs softly at the memory and says, “That crowd was incredible. It was just a great, great tour,” before dropping a bit of a scoop.

“We’ll 100 per cent be back.”

While we eagerly wait for an official announcement, there’s the new album to dig into. In Can We Please Have Fun, the band lean into their southern rock roots in a way they haven’t for many albums, while not losing sight of the fact these songs will need to shake stadiums. It’s their best album in years.

Kings of Leon's new album, Can We Please Have Fun, is out now.

‘We owe it to you guys’

When asked about the album’s genesis and what shaped its direction, Jared answers quickly.

“Oddly enough, it was our tour that we went to New Zealand where we played some incredible shows in front of crowds that we hadn’t seen in a while,” he says. “We were at a crossroads. We could stop and celebrate what we had done for the past 20 years and I think everyone around us was anticipating that’s what we were going to do. But we got a spark of creativity and inspiration on that tour, so we said, ‘We’re not ready for that’. We wanted to begin the next chapter.”

Then he pauses and says, “We owe it to you guys.”

If you were at those shows, then pat yourself on the back. You should feel extremely proud of your rocking efforts that directly led to a return to form for the band. Can We Please Have Fun is an electrifying listen with punchy knockout post-punk, scratchy mid-tempo southern rockers and brooding slow-burners. That creative spark lit, appropriately enough at Spark Arena, obvious.

“I think there have been times in the past where maybe amongst ourselves we kind of questioned if our hearts were still in it as a whole,” Caleb admits, thinking back to some of their past records. “Because sometimes you hit a patch where it’s like somebody’s ready to go and they’re inspired and it takes a second to get the others to come along. That wasn’t the case with this. This was like, kick the door open, we’re ready! And yeah, I feel like you’ll be able to hear that.”

Are Kings of Leon embarking on a fun-filled new chapter?

This energy spilled into every part of the band. They left the label they’d been with for two decades and forged a new deal that gave them much more freedom, and terms that had one industry source revealing “Kings of Leon are one of the few bands on the planet who have enough heft to negotiate such a favourable deal”.

“There’s a freedom to not being contractually obligated to make music. And that’s where we were,” Jared sighs, thinking back, before brightening up to talk about their new home. “They were just like, ‘You guys can go do what you want. You can do one song, release an EP, work with whoever you want to’. There were no expectations. And so we just did what we wanted. We were ready to do it.”

“Yeah, 20 years into our career, we made our first indie album,” Caleb jokes. “We weren’t making it for anyone other than ourselves. We weren’t concerned with how it would be accepted, if it would be successful or if it would fall flat on its face. I knew it was going to be successful because it was successful with us. I’ve never been as fulfilled as I was on this album because we really just made it for ourselves. We had a goal. We hit that mark.”

He tells a story about going home one day during the recording and being asked how it was going by his wife.

“I told her, ‘If this album is successful, if it isn’t, for the first time in my life, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me. This album is one of the most important things I’ve ever done,” he says with the utmost sincerity. “It’s one of the marks in our lives that we will always look back on and say, ‘Oh, man, those were the good old days’.”

Then with all the earnestness he puts into Kings of Leon’s more personal songs, Caleb Followill says, “You know, there’s the saying that bumpy roads lead to beautiful places. I do believe that that’s true. Everything has a time and purpose. If we had tried to make this earlier, it wouldn’t have happened. Everything that we did led us to this moment.”