Kings of Leon frontman Caleb Followill is an arena-rock idealist, a firm believer in the undying power of setting up shop at the 50-yard line of rock & roll expectations and doing very brisk business. “Like in a mainstream melody / Oh, I want to take you in!” he told us on the Kings’ last album, 2016’s Walls, a subtle come-on that was a pretty fair assessment of why his band’s music hit home with millions.
So, what do these Tennessee titans do in times like these, when there aren’t any arenas to be rocked? In some ways, the band’s eighth album is an arena rock of the mind, tempering the strapping anthemics of hits like “Sex on Fire” and “Use Somebody” for songs that stretch out en route to arriving at a serene kind of swagger.
Followill, brothers Nathan and Jared, and cousin Matthew are still as sexily en fuego as ever. The lead single, “Bandit,” lunges and soars with rippling guitar leads cascading across some of the dirtiest riffs the band has put on a record since the New South-meets-neo-Strokes garage moves of its first two albums, Youth & Young Manhood and Aha Shake Heartbreak, in the early 2000s. “Golden Restless Age” is low-slung and sleek, piling on slashing, intersecting guitars before lifting off into a golden restless chorus. And the crosscutting punk riffs on “Echoing” are downright violent.
But if you’re looking for the woo-woo payoffs the Kings do so well, this record might surprise you. Even at their most sweeping, these songs brood and meander a bit, often in interesting directions. Album opener “When You See Yourself, Are You Far Away” is all tension and no release, its gorgeous guitar arpeggios and martial groove leading to the epiphany: “The pleasures of this life I’m told, will spit you out in the middle of the road.” On “100,000 People,” Followill sings about love as a defense against today’s bleakness over a slow, soft-focused track that suggests a tough, Southern-steeped Coldplay. With its tight soul bass line, “Stormy Weather” feels like it might turn into a manly soul stomp, but instead, it pensively shimmies into the middle distance as Followill plays the love man in distress.
Throughout, producer Markus Dravs (Coldplay, Mumford & Sons) gives everything a graceful sheen, whether on the soft-rock romance “Claire & Eddie” or the moody “Supermarket,” with its molten goth bass line and lyrics that start as an invite to chill and end as a dream of getting clean and “whole again.”
Turns out these guys can revel in ambiguity just as fully as they once reveled in their youth and young manhood.
ALBUM REVIEWS
The leather jackets and skinny jeans worn by Noah Dillon and Chandler Ransom Lucy have become something of a signature, and the pair have hovered around the edges of the pop worlds in New York and Los Angeles for quite some time. First highlighted by NME during the Dimes Square resurgence in 2023, The Hellp have gradually stepped away from their earlier indie-sleaze imitation and leaned into something far more thoughtful. Their wild, neon-tinged party vibe has been traded for a more cinematic electronic approach that still holds onto a confident, self-aware attitude.
Dillon and Lucy started releasing music as The Hellp in 2016, with early mixtapes rooted in the chaotic nights and carefree behaviour once associated with NYC’s indie-sleaze staples like LCD Soundsystem and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Over time, though, they’ve earned a steadily growing respect from critics. That rise has come through both their underground gigs, which have included a show at London’s Corsica Studios with Fakemink as support, and through Dillon’s expanding visual work that recently reached Rosalía’s ‘LUX’ album and a pair of music videos for 2hollis.
As ‘Riviera’ approached release, the duo shared: “We knew our next project would need to be a bit more mature… we refuse to become stagnant. ‘Riviera’ is more solemn, restrained and impassioned than anything we’ve done before.” The finished album feels like Dillon and Lucy carefully balancing identity and openness, theatricality and direct emotion.
The lead release, ‘Country Road’, carries a late-night heaviness, the kind of confession you would quietly tell a friend in a club’s smoking area. Its lonely tone is surrounded by glitching electronics and a rising bridge that points to the exhaustion that follows endless nights out. Tracks like ‘New Wave America’ and ‘Cortt’ deepen what the duo mention in their liner notes as a “desperate story of the disparate Americana.” Both pieces broaden the album’s emotional landscape and offer clear-eyed commentary on reluctantly stepping into adulthood.
When ‘Riviera’ shifts into ‘Doppler’, the tone brightens for a moment as hopeful synths lift Dillon’s words about yearning and heartbreak into an emotional peak. And in the final moments of the record, The Hellp land on something instantly familiar to anyone who has drifted away from the club scene. The Kavinsky-like opening of ‘Here I Am’ nods to their early inspirations, while the closing track ‘Live Forever’ arrives with a slow, grounded maturity, built around Dillon repeating the line: “I don’t want to live forever.”
‘Riviera’ holds far less disorder than The Hellp’s earlier releases. This turn inward marks an important risk for a duo once fuelled by the momentum of a downtown New York comeback. By easing off the frenzy, The Hellp have stepped out of the party’s lingering haze and returned with a style that feels more refined and more aware of itself than anything they have created before.
