Kings of Leon began their tenth album, O My Beloved, after Caleb Followill broke his leg and the band cancelled shows in 2025. Writing at home during his recovery, he found a quieter sound for songs about family, childhood and getting older. The Nashville sessions that followed became the band’s first fully self-produced album, released on November 6 through their own label.
Caleb Followill was playing tag with his children when he broke his leg. Kings of Leon cancelled shows in the United States and Europe while he recovered. For a singer used to spending long stretches on the road, the sudden time at home was difficult to settle into. When he picked up his guitar, he was working through that change before he was thinking about a new album.
“My Whole World” came first. Followill remembers writing it quickly and feeling surprised at how easily the song took shape. It became the first single from O My Beloved, but at home the writing was an exercise he could do without knowing what would happen to the result. He later described the process as therapeutic, a way to spend time with things he had found easier to leave alone when work kept moving.
The injury had also left him feeling that he had let people down. The other members had lost shows too, and audiences had made plans around the dates. He has described the period as a kind of midlife crisis. The songs allowed him to move from that frustration to questions that had little to do with a concert schedule, including what he remembered of his own childhood and what he recognised in his children’s lives.
Caleb expected Nathan, Jared and Matthew Followill to be wary of the material when he played it for them. The songs had a quieter scale than the guitar records that had made Kings of Leon familiar to large audiences. His bandmates heard something worth keeping in that quality. Their decision to follow the songs as he had brought them in set the direction for the sessions.
Kings of Leon worked at Neon Leon, their Nashville studio, and decided to produce the album themselves. The room belonged to them, and they could return to a part when they wanted to hear it differently. They also had the freedom to keep a performance that felt right before every rough edge had been removed. Followill described the process as liberating, with choices about the sound made among the four musicians as they played.
O My Beloved still has electric guitar. It tends to enter where the song calls for more weight, with acoustic playing, keys, strings and restrained percussion carrying much of the record. That balance gives the voices and melodies room to stay at the front. The overall impression is of a band close enough together to hear the smaller choices being made as a performance takes shape.
Across the 13 tracks, Kings of Leon look at family from several positions. There are memories of being children, reflections on becoming parents and the sense that the time between those two experiences has gone quickly. The subject carries a particular meaning for three brothers and a cousin who have spent much of their adult lives playing in the same band. Their shared history gives the songs a frame without requiring a listener to know the family.
The video for “My Whole World” draws on childhood footage from the Followills’ own families. It brings the people behind those memories into the visual record as well as the lyrics. “KOYSAR,” short for “Kick Off Your Shoes and Run,” takes up another part of the same subject. Its title gives the feeling of childhood freedom a physical action a listener can picture.
“Cold Blue Dawn” reached audiences with a lyric video made in collaboration with The Weather Channel. It uses satellite images from NASA, finding forms in rivers, coastlines and other landscapes that suggest the words. The scale of those pictures is different from the home footage in “My Whole World.” Both videos take a song outside the recording room and give the listener something concrete to look at as the words pass.
Kings of Leon close the album with “Get You Down,” a song in which Followill acknowledges how much he still wants to learn. The record came out on November 6 through the band’s Love Tap Records, with distribution from Virgin Music Group. The release arrangements follow the same decision the musicians made in Nashville: they would take responsibility for the record from the sessions onward.
A London date was scheduled for November 10, with Abu Dhabi to follow on December 3 and more touring in 2027. Followill has left open the possibility that the quieter album will affect how Kings of Leon approach those shows. At home, the guitar had given him a way back to work after a stretch in which he could not tour. The next question is how much of the space he found in those sessions the band can bring with it onto a stage.
