Kings of Leon - Mechanical Bull

Features the songs "Supersoaker," "Beautiful War" and "Temple"

Double vinyl gatefold LP

Album download code included

"Mechanical Bull," recorded after a year of wound-licking, represents a total rebound. The Tennessee band's sixth disc boasts the most clear-eyed performances, finest writing and sharpest focus of Kings Of Leon's career. And the band seems to know it." — New York Daily News

2013 release, the sixth album from the Grammy-winning rock quartet. The Kings of Leon hadn't even started to think about making a new album when they headed out to play shows in Australia and South Africa in late 2011. The four Followills —singer/ guitarist Caleb, guitarist Matthew, drummer Nathan, bassist Jared — had been on a fairly relentless grind for the preceding eight years, releasing five albums and touring the world dozens of times since emerging from Nashville in early 2003. They exhausted themselves to the point of needing a concrete break that summer, and they announced they'd be taking six months off. But these Kings never can seem to let more than a few months pass without writing new songs: Caleb sat down in his hotel room in South Africa and penned a pair of tracks that set the tone for their new album, Mechanical Bull, and there wasn't really any stopping from there.

Those songs -- a powerful strutter called "Temple" that consolidates all the best elements of the band's first three albums into one of their most irresistible, signature-sounding bangers yet, and the soaring ballad "Comeback Story," which injects trademark Followill humor into its otherwise heartbreaking tone — catalyzed an album that sounds like a more refined version of classic Kings. "We wanted to write songs that are like a little two-and-a-half minute punch in the face," Nathan says of the eleven tunes on the album, which clocks in at an all-too-brief 42 minutes. "We wanted to make a record that as soon as it's over, people want to play it again." 

By the time the Followills got together last fall, Caleb listened back to his demos and found close to 20 ideas he felt good about presenting to the band. "I think Caleb was more surprised than any of us at how much we embraced the songs immediately," says Nathan. "We went in the studio and he played like six of them in a row where we were like ‘YES!'"

"There are more layers to this album than there have been before," says Jared, who names songs like the hard-driving "Don't Matter" and a sweetly sad track called "Wait For Me" as personal favorites. "We were all secretly paying attention to what people have been saying about us — our fans and what they wanted to hear," Caleb says. "We didn't want songs sounding alike. We wanted songs to be anthemic in a different way than they had been before. We didn't want songs to be all stretched out and reverby; we wanted it a little raw. We wanted it to kind of feel like, at times you're playing with the only amp you have and the only guitar you have and you gotta make it work."

 

Side 1

Supersoaker

Rock City

Don't Matter

Side 2

Beautiful War

Temple

Side 3

Wait For Me

Family Tree

Comeback Story

Side 4

Tonight

Coming Back Again

On The Chin

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