STACK #197 Mar 2021

MUSIC FEATURE

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Kings Of Leon, L-R: Nathan, Caleb, Matthew, and Jared Followill

INTERVIEW

NATHAN FOLLOWILL KINGS OF LEON Working with Grammy-winning producer Markus Dravs for the second time, Kings Of Leon are ready to release the aural fireflies of When You SeeYourself into the night air. Drummer Nathan Followill talks specifics of the four-piece's eighth album, out now. Words Zoë Radas

W hen the three Followill brothers were just little lambs, they were fans of country music by geographical circumstance; they'd listen to old timey tapes in the car as their parents drove through the southern United States, stopping to camp in whichever township their Pentecostal minister father was scheduled to preach at the time. They weren't long into their teens before hard-, blues-, and

punk-rock records made their mark, and when their cousin Matthew (also surnamed Followill) joined the wolfpack to form the entity we now know as Kings Of Leon, the Southern rock influences of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Creedence Clearwater Revival had given way to Pixies, The Velvet Underground, and The Clash. So it went, throughout the four-piece's first three albums (2003's Youth &Young Manhood ,

2004's Aha Shake Heartbreak , and 2007's Because Of The Times ). Then came Sex On Fire . The group have ridden zeniths and nadirs aplenty as they've travelled the 12 years between that violently popular single (from album Only By The Night , of 2008); they've created their own families, endured appalling accidents, navigated bad press and, in 2016,

70 MARCH 2021

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