Kings of Leon's O My Beloved Began With a Game of Tag

Kings of Leon in 2026. Photo: Josh Goleman

Kings of Leon’s tenth album exists because of a game of tag. Caleb Followill was about to join his bandmates on a European tour when he tried to hurdle the couch at home to tag one of his kids, caught his foot and went down. “It was a gnarly, gnarly break,” he told the Associated Press. The tour was called off, the electric songs the band had been building were dropped, and what he wrote next became O My Beloved, out now, Friday 6 November, on LoveTap Records.

It is a quiet record from a band once built for arenas: 13 tracks of acoustic guitars, family memories and gratitude, and the first full-length album Kings of Leon have produced themselves. Here is how a broken foot turned the Followills toward home, what is on the tracklist, and what the first reviews make of it.

How a Broken Foot Changed the Whole Record

Caleb tells the story with a laugh now. “I thought I was in better shape than I was and so I was going to hurdle the couch to make the epic tag,” he told AP. Instead his foot caught in the couch and he stumbled. He was upset, and felt he was letting everyone down.

After a few days of what AP calls wallowing in self-pity, he picked up a guitar. What came out was stripped bare, close to the music he and his drummer brother Nathan wrote before there was a four-time Grammy-winning Kings of Leon. The four or five electric-leaning songs the band had been exploring went out. In came stripped-down tunes, more melancholic than bombastic, about 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,” Caleb 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.” Nathan was on board: “I’m happy with the direction. I think it might be my kids’ favorite record.”

My Whole World Started as a Countdown on the Wall

The first single, “My Whole World”, poured out of Caleb after the accident. With the tour off and his family preparing for a cruise, he glanced at their countdown on the wall and the opening words arrived: “29 days ’till our ship comes in / We’ll be together again.”

The song is a scene of domestic bliss, with a peanut butter pie, a pin oak tree and a football tossed around while babies coo. Consequence describes it as guided by an acoustic guitar and a modest trot, folding into a sweetly sung ode to the people in the band’s lives over a country-tinged arrangement. Its video is cut from old home footage of the Followill boys growing up: Christmas mornings, goofing around, swimming holes.

Caleb admits he was nervous to play it to the others. He did not normally play guitar that way, and the lyrics made him emotional. “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 of feelings he had set aside through a quarter of a century as a busy dad and rock and roller. He also told AP why he chose this record over a career retrospective: “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?”

The First Album Kings of Leon Produced Themselves

The change of direction was easier because nobody else was steering. Bassist Jared Followill told AP the band were free to explore because this was the first time 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.”

Clash makes the same point in its review: with self-production comes complete control over creative direction, and the direction they chose was the opposite of where they had been. Even the album’s smallest moment shows the do-it-yourself approach. AP describes a tiny lo-fi piece carrying the album’s title, captured on a smartphone in the wet and cold outside the band’s Nashville studio as a train rumbled past. “It turned out really, really cool and so we kept it,” Jared said.

The record opens in a similar spirit. RIFF Magazine hears the 58-second “Intro” place the listener in a car crossing a busy city, then fade the noise out as Caleb quietly repeats the album’s title over a wash of guitar. It is a long way from the big chorus of a song like “Radioactive”, as Far Out notes, and that is the point.

Inside the 13 Tracks, From Intro to Get You Down

The official tracklist on Apple Music runs: Intro, My Whole World, Cold Blue Dawn, The Hand, Rose, Make It Count, KOYSAR, Feel The Love, Blue Jeans and Diamonds, Warm Company, Forever Endeavor, Pretty Thing and Get You Down. It is credited to LoveTap Records and distributed by Virgin Music Group.

“KOYSAR” stands for “Kick Off Your Shoes and Run”, and Caleb uses childhood memories of running around with his siblings to speak to his own kids. “All I could picture was our childhood, running through sprinklers and my kids and those little simple moments,” he told AP. “Pretty Thing” looks back at a high school sweetheart: “I like to lay in the light of the moon / And think about the summer that I had with you.” Caleb said that was the kind of song they wanted to write before the band went in a different direction. “We finally got to do it on album 10.”

The heavier moments are few but they land. Both Clash and RIFF single out the guitar solo on “Make It Count”, a carpe diem song in Clash’s reading; RIFF says the solo injects some much-needed energy into the album. RIFF reads “Blue Jeans and Diamonds” as a mildly cynical look at wedding rituals, built around lines such as “What about that ring? / It cost me a month’s pay.”

What the First Reviews Say About O My Beloved

Critics split on whether the calm is a strength. Clash gives it 8/10, calling it a philosophical, reflective Americana sojourn and a triumphant tenth album. “Packed with Americana tunes that would make even The Boss himself Bruce Springsteen shed a tear, ‘O My Beloved’ deserves to be heard,” writes Emma Constance.

Far Out lands in the middle with three stars. Callum MacHattie hears Caleb’s voice drawl to the verge of country over sliding guitar lines, describes the record as an embrace of the mellow present and names “Rose” its standout track. His verdict: “while on O My Beloved comforts aches, it rarely inspires.”

RIFF Magazine is the toughest so far at 5/10. Ian Glackin finds the sound perpetually midtempo and laid-back, with the band generally playing it safe, but ends on a fair point: “It’s hard to fault artists for writing about what’s most important to them.”

Where O My Beloved Fits in the Kings of Leon Story

The new album follows 2024’s Can We Please Have Fun, which NME called “easily KOL’s most promising, liberated record for over a decade”. Since then the band have guested on Zach Bryan’s 2025 song “Bowery”, surprise-released an EP titled #2 and played New Orleans Jazz Fest, according to Consequence. NME adds a big 2026 UK tour with The Snuts, The Lathums and The Royston Club, a headline slot at Mad Cool in Madrid and a hits-packed set to open the first State Fayre festival.

They marked the album announcement in September by going small: a one-off show at Basement East in Nashville, tickets on the door only and capped at two per person, a nod to the clubs they played as teenagers. Clash counts more than 20 million records sold and four Grammys behind them, which is exactly why a soft, home-made record is a statement.

They are not the only act going back to basics this autumn. Our report on how Dead Man’s Bones recorded their first song in 17 years on a farm in one day is another story of a band keeping things simple. For Kings of Leon, it took a couch, a game of tag and a broken foot. O My Beloved is out now on all major streaming platforms.