Kings of Leon Come Around Sundown

The Followill clan has been busy since breaking big in America with 2008's Only by the Night, headlining festivals like Glastonbury, Reading, Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo while grasping their role as one of the States' biggest exports. In between touring all over the globe and trying not to get sick of playing "Use Somebody" at every awards show, they found the time to record Come Around Sundown, their fifth album. Frequent KoL collaborators Angelo Petraglia and Jacquire King, the latter behind bands like Modest Mouse, Annuals and Switchfoot, once again manned the studio to produce this album.

Songs like "Radioactive" have the Kings toying with the sweet-tinged Southern pickings they've made their bones on, while "Southbound" replicates the rural yearning that's found the boys blasted in school parking lots across the country. Drummer Nathan Followill says the band was trying to record a darker album; as he told the NME, it's surprising that the tracks came out so "beach-y."

Abstract by Jeremy Gordon