Kings of Leon: WALLS review – it should be utterly horrendous

This is Kings of Leon as you haven’t really heard them before: pop-facing, channelling the guitar sounds of the 1980s. WALLS, their seventh album, starts with a song called Waste a Moment, whose chord progression packs a little nod to Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run.

In the song’s “woah oh oh”s, in its emotive crescendo, you can detect the hand of their latest producer, Markus Dravs, who took Arcade Fire from indie striplings to anthem-mongers; his latest credit is Florence + the Machine. At the opposite end of the tracklisting, the album closer WALLS finds Caleb Followill – hair thinning, a little vulnerable – in ballad mode, pronouncing words as you or I might, rather than with his former cheekful-of-tobacco slur. WALLS apparently stands for “we are like love songs”: the syllable count fits the Kings of Leon album title tradition.

Other traditions are looking decidedly more negotiable, however. Here are songs like Find Me, whose 80s-cribbing production recalls, to varying degrees, bands as shiny as the Killers, or as period-perfect as the War on Drugs. You might just detect, perhaps, the needly guitars and galumph of Talking Heads on the verses of Around the World, an autobiographical romp in which the band “go around the world” and “find a girl”. Over, which ends bleakly, rings out particularly rueful and retro, with Followill intoning his words rather than singing. “I face the music,” he proclaims, still atoning, perhaps, for the time he nearly derailed the band back in 2011 with an onstage meltdown and subsequent rehab.

This, then, is a big, expansive, commercial album, its hair shorn and occasionally gelled into directional styles, but one keen to bare its soul. The implication of a title like WALLS is, after all, that they should come down. It should be utterly horrendous, the very antithesis of the skinny, hirsute heap of jangling hormones that Kings of Leon first presented 13-odd years ago. Actually, WALLS sounds pretty good, full of jewel-like detail and cogency. It’s as though Kings of Leon’s sound has been put through an unexpected series of aural Instagram filters that really don’t do the band a disservice.

Lyrically, Caleb Followill is often downbeat, imagining what would happen if his wife left him. On Muchacho – an unexpectedly lovely piece of plinky-plonky esoterica – he recalls a friend who died.

Eyes on You, meanwhile, is the album’s token throwback to Kings of Leon basics, its carefree, bish-bosh swing rekindling memories of the band once dubbed “the southern Strokes”. You can’t get away from the fact that WALLS is a slick offering from rich rock stars. But it remains easy on the ear.