NEW YORK (AP) — Kings of Leon return this fall with a new album that's a bit of a left turn, sonic-wise. And for that, you can thank a game of tag that went, well, sideways.
Frontman Caleb Followill was working on new music last spring and about to join his bandmates on a European tour when he broke his foot playing with his kids one night before bed.
“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 says, laughing. Instead, he got a foot caught in the couch, stumbled and went down. “It was a gnarly, gnarly break.”
Followill was upset, feeling he was letting everyone down. After a few days of wallowing in self-pity, he picked up a guitar. What came out surprised him: It was stripped bare, like the music that he and his drummer brother Nathan had written before there was a four-time Grammy Award-winning Kings of Leon.
So out went the four or five electric-leaning songs that he and the band had been exploring. In quickly came a clutch of new stripped-down tunes, more melancholic than bombastic, about gratitude and family. The 13-track album is called “O My Beloved” and it's out Nov. 6.
“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,” says Caleb Followill. “I feel like just the whole temperature changed around us. And we realized that we’re going to make something a little more significant.”
What did the rest of the band think? They had to change course, too, after all. “I’m happy with the direction,” says Nathan Followill. “I think it might be my kids' favorite record.”
The first single, “My Whole World,” out Thursday, is a perfect taste of the way the band was now leaning. It poured out of Caleb Followill after the whole tag accident.
While he and bandmates — brothers Nathan and Jared and cousin Matthew Followill — called off their European tour, and Caleb's family was preparing for a cruise, he was glancing at their countdown on the wall when these words came out: “29 days 'till our ship comes in/We’ll be together again.”
“My Whole World” is a scene of domestic bliss — with references to “peanut butter pie” and a “pin oak tree” and tossing a football around while babies coo. “I’m grateful / Each day for / My whole world,” he sings. A video for the single features old home footage of the boys growing up — Christmas mornings, goofing around and swimming holes.
Caleb Followill says he was nervous to debut the acoustic-led song to the other guys, in part because he didn't normally play his guitar that way and because the lyrics made him emotional.
“I wasn’t in control of it. The words were just coming out,” he says. He thought of his mom dying and all the feelings he had put aside as a busy dad and rock and roller for the past quarter century.
“We have already surpassed anything we ever imagined we could do and we’ve built something that’s so beautiful,” he says. “So, 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?”
Bassist Jared Followill says the band was free to explore this new direction since the new album would be the first time they would be producing 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 says. “No hesitation from us.”
One album highlight is the joyful, laid-back “KOYSAR” for “Kick Off Your Shoes and Run,” in which Caleb Followill uses his childhood memories of romping around with his siblings to inspire his own kids.
“Kick off your shoes and run/Don’t let them turn you away/Your life is better when/You have something to say,” he sings.
“All I could picture was our childhood, running through sprinklers and my kids and those little simple moments,” he says. “You’re always trying to teach your kids something, and I feel the best way to do that is through your experience and through the mistakes that you’ve made and how you’ve gotten to where you are.”
On “Such a Pretty Thing,” he writes tenderly about a high school sweetheart, singing, “I like to lay in the light of the moon/And think about the summer that I had with you.”
“That was the kind of songs that we wanted to write, and then we started the band and kind of went a different direction. But on this album, I feel like we kind of got back to that,” says Caleb Followill. “We finally got to do it on album 10.”
The title track is unconventional, too. It's a musical interlude that has the title on it, a tiny, lo-fi slice of Caleb Followill singing and playing captured on a smartphone in the wet and cold outside the band's Nashville studio with the sound of a train rumbling by.
“It turned out really, really cool and so we kept it,” says Jared Followill.
FILE -Kings of Leon, from left, Jared Followill, Matthew Followill, Caleb Followill, and Nathan Followill pose in Nashville, Tenn., on Oct. 3, 2016. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File)
FILE - Jared Followill, from left, Caleb Followill, Matthew Followill, and Nathan Followill of Kings of Leon appear at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards in Las Vegas on April 3, 2022. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)
STOCKHOLM (AP) — Sweden is holding an election on Sunday that will determine whether a conservative leader remains in charge and a hard-right party wins ministerial jobs for the first time, or whether the center-left returns to power.
Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson is seeking a second four-year term at the helm of the European Union nation that is also NATO’s newest member. His predecessor hopes to win the job back. The question of who will govern has taken up more space than actual policy issues.
More than 8 million people in the nation of about 10.6 million people are eligible to vote in the election for the 349-seat parliament in Stockholm, the Riksdag, which will elect the next prime minister.
Kristersson has led Sweden since 2022 with a three-party center-right coalition. It relies on outside support from the Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigration party that has far-right roots but has moved toward the political mainstream, for a parliamentary majority. If the right is re-elected, it can expect Cabinet posts this time.
He's up against Magdalena Andersson of the center-left Social Democrats, a party that more often than not led Swedish governments since World War II. Andersson served as prime minister from 2021 until she lost power at the last election.
Experts say the campaign has been fragmented and incoherent, with policy questions such as how health care should be organized drowned out by the question of which parties will be able to put together a government.
“Crime has come down, inflation has come down. So these topics are not really what people discuss," said Zeth Isaksson, a sociologist in electoral behavior at Stockholm University. "People discuss who is going to be in government, and that’s what the election is about.”
There are two major political blocs: one with four parties on the right and another with four parties on the left. So the big question is not so much which party wins as which side can put together a majority. Individual parties need a minimum 4% of the vote to win parliamentary seats.
On the face of it, “it would be a sensation if the opposition parties, having been ahead in the opinion polls pretty much for four years since the last election, didn’t now win a majority,” said Nicholas Aylott, associate professor of political science at Södertörn University.
But he said that an “extremely defensive” campaign by the Social Democrats may have cost them some support, leaving some voters wondering why they should support the party. The right-wing bloc's hope of convincing voters that it's more united than its rivals may have had “a little impact,” he added.
One significant thing is different in this election. The Sweden Democrats, who in 2022 took 20.5% of the vote to become the biggest party on the right, can expect Cabinet seats if power doesn't change hands.
Kristersson announced in April that his conservative Moderates would allow them into government if the right has a majority — though he would remain prime minister, even if the Sweden Democrats are the stronger party.
The Sweden Democrats were founded in the 1980s by people who had been active in right-wing extremist groups, including neo-Nazis. They toned down their rhetoric and expelled openly racist members under Jimmie Åkesson, who has led them since 2005 and overseen their growth from what was once a marginal party.
“There’s some, I won’t say fear, but trepidation, apprehension about the possibility of Sweden Democrat ministers,” Aylott said, and the Social Democrats recently have tried to exploit that.
But even as parties on the populist right gain elsewhere in Europe, for instance in a far-right triumph in a weekend state election in Germany, the election may reinforce the impression that the Sweden Democrats “have peaked to some extent,” Isaksson said.
Not so much. “The biggest threat to Sweden’s security is from the war in Ukraine and there is almost complete consensus in Sweden about support for Ukraine and deep antipathy towards Russia,” Aylott said.
Sweden's Psychological Defense Agency said that the country's election isn't Russia's top priority, as that broad support reduces the incentive for Moscow to interfere.
However, just over a week before the election, Expo magazine published a report alleging that a civil servant working in parliament for the Sweden Democrats had spread Russian state narratives on social networks. She is the partner of the head of the party's coordination office with the government, Gustav Gellerbrant.
Gellerbrant said her posts were taken out of context and were meant as irony and sarcasm. He said he decided to go on parental leave to avoid shifting the focus of the election campaign.
Kristersson, who said that “there is no room for pro-Russian narratives in Sweden," welcomed that decision.
After decades of post-World War II neutrality and centuries of broader nonalignment with major powers, Sweden joined NATO in 2024 as the trans-Atlantic military alliance’s 32nd member. The move to join was initiated by Andersson's government after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and completed under Kristersson.
Sweden's Center Party leader Elisabeth Thand Ringqvist, left, campaigns with former party leader Annie Lööf in Stockholm, Sweden, Saturday Sept. 5, 2026, ahead of the general election on Sept. 13. (Stefan Jerrevång/TT via AP)
Sweden Democrats party leader Jimmie Åkesson (SD) presents the party's election manifesto for 2026 at Stora torget in Nyköping, Sweden, Monday, Sept. 7, 2026. (Magnus Lejhall/TT News Agency via AP)
Sweden Democrats party leader Jimmie Åkesson (SD) presents the party's election manifesto for 2026 at Stora torget in Nyköping, Sweden, Monday, Sept. 7, 2026. (Magnus Lejhall/TT News Agency via AP)
Sweden's Social Democratic Party leader Magdalena Andersson gives a speech in Stockholm, Sweden, Saturday Sept. 5, 2026, ahead of general election on Sept. 13. (Jonathan Näckstrand/TT via AP)
Swedish Moderate Party Ministers, from left, Pål Jonson, Ulf Kristersson, Gunnar Strömmer, Elisabeth Svantesson and Maria Malmer Stenergard hold an election rally in Malmö, Sweden, Saturday Sept. 5, 2026, ahead of general election on Sept. 13. (Johan Nilsson/TT via AP)
