Kings of Leon have played this exact stretch of sand before. On May 17, 2013, they closed the first night of the Hangout Music Fest on Gulf Shores Public Beach, the festival that held this site before Sand in My Boots, and it was only their second American show since they'd stepped off the road in 2011. About six songs in, Caleb Followill told the crowd it was the best American crowd they'd seen in a long, long time. The set leaned on the early records, with one then-unreleased song, "It Don't Matter," slipped in from the album they had due that September. The band formed in 1999 around Caleb, Nathan and Jared Followill, brothers who grew up trailing their evangelist father between Pentecostal churches and tent revivals, plus their cousin Matthew.
Their American breakthrough was Only by the Night in 2008, the album that gave them their first U.K. No. 1 hit in "Sex on Fire," and "Use Somebody" went on to win Record of the Year at the 2010 Grammys. After 2024's Can We Please Have Fun, a guest spot on Zach Bryan's "Bowery" and a surprise EP called #2, they released O My Beloved on November 6, 2026, through Love Tap Records. It's their 10th album and the first they produced themselves, and Caleb says it looks back at how they got here: their families, childhood stories, small things that turned out to matter. The first song they shared from it, "My Whole World," is mostly acoustic guitar and an easy trot. They announced it with a show at the Basement East in Nashville, the kind of club they played as teenagers.