release date: Mar. 5, 2021
format: digital
[album rate: 4 / 5] [3,80]
producer: Markus Dravs
label: RCA Records - nationality: USA
Track highlights: 1. "When You See Yourself, Are You Far Away" - 2. "The Bandit" (live) - 3. "100,000 People" (4 / 5) - 4. "Stormy Weather" - 5. "A Wave" (4 / 5) - 6. "Golden Restless Age" - 8. "Supermarket"
8th studio album from Kings of Leon following 4½ år after WALLS (Oct. 2016) is the band's second consecutive album to be made with producer Markus Dravs.
Stylewise, this new album doesn't come up with great many surprises. Kings of Leon is a band set on playing their own melodic mix of alt. rock and they basically keep quite strict to a formula they have distilled on since 2008 / 2010. And yet, this one comfortly manages to place itself in the better half of the band's repertoire, thus distancing itself elegantly from the poppier WALLS, which still holds up the band's so far only to reach the glorious national first spot on Billboard 200. Saleswise, it would have been expected that the band and its record company in support would go for a replication of success, but instead the band has produced, what to me sounds like, a gracious mix of its artistic peak with Come Around Sundown (2010) and Only by the Night (2008). By doing so, you could argue that Kings of Leon have found back on a proper course they sought out a decade ago but which instead took them on a sidetrack occupied by pop-ballads - something you'll find plenty of on their previous two studio albums from 2013 and 2016, respectively. Even with some retreatment to former heydays, When You See Yourself still makes a fine updated version of one of the finest US rockbands this century.
Highly recommended
