Lead singer Caleb Followill’s voice is the life preserver you desperately cling to, but the music sounds so good that if you were to be swallowed by the undertow, it might not be so bad. “Use Somebody” takes no prisoners and flings the listener into a tempest-tossed ocean of sound from the first note. The debut single “Sex on Fire” ignited the charts, and the album’s second single “Use Somebody” became an instant classic, going platinum and reaching number one on the Billboard Top 40 charts. In the decade since I discovered them, I’ve done some roaming around, but no one fills the places I can’t reach like Kings of Leon.īorn in the buckle of the Bible Belt in the same musically fertile land that gave the world Elvis Presley, these kings born of Leon (the band is named after Followills’ grandfather) are tangible and real and very much alive with warm flesh, thumping red blood and bone-shaking drumbeats twined around howling guitars and naked vocals.ĭespite being huge in Europe, Kings of Leon didn’t really make a splash in United States until the 2008 release of Only By The Night. Luckily for the rest of humanity, this was so much more than an artificial fever dream trapped in my pop-culture-addled mind.

A quartet of charming Southern gentlemen playing the kind of bluesy rock that I really needed to help me get through the aha shake and heartbreak of my early twenties? It couldn’t possibly be real. The first time I heard Kings of Leon, I wondered if I hadn’t dreamed them into being. They are made by artificial hallucination.

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