PYRO

“Pyro” by Kings of Leon

Come Around Sundown [RCA, 2010]

Kings of Leon became a huge, inescapable name just before the 2010s began, thanks to two massive hits, “Sex on Fire” and “Use Somebody,” from 2008’s Only by the Night. The band then put their win from that album into its follow-up LP, Come Around Sundown, a more-of-the-same type of record that fine-tunes the winning formula: “Radioactive” served the alt-rock crowd hungry for a macho voice out on a conquest, and “Pyro,” the selection for this playlist, was the chaser to wash that down with some Southwestern warmth and a vague gesture at sensitivity.

Though I enjoyed them at the time, I listened to the Come Around Sundown singles not so much for its own sake but as seconds to fulfill a leftover appetite provided by Only by the Night. I would not want any more after that despite the band releasing two more albums, Mechanical Bull and Walls.

Part of that loss of interest with Kings of Leon is due to me spending less and less time tuned into local alt-rock stations -- or really, any radio for that matter. Mechanical Bull’s release year of 2013 happens to be the first point of the decade when I only have a passing familiarity with the on-air charts. My relationship with alt-rock radio was secondhand: I mostly got exposure of it whenever I rode my ex-partner’s car or when she had it playing in her room, so once I was single, the radio stopped being a presence in my life almost immediately.

Though it’s not like a departure from alt-rock radio at the early point of the decade would harm one’s understanding of Kings of Leon. “Waste a Moment,” the lead sing from 2016’s Walls, sounds more or less like what it has been making since it first cashed in that Only by the Night money. More clean-cut and less beer-soaked, maybe, but it’s still unmistakably Kings of Leon. The band has yet to share new music since, though I would count on the Followills sticking to the script.

The sound and attitude of rock music that Kings of Leon molded its singles to resemble for the rest of the decade feel outdated as the 2010s comes to a close. The band’s songs already sounded like music of a progressively fading era even during mainstream rock’s evolution as they got slotted in the same playlist with Two Door Cinema Club’s shiny guitar squiggles, Of Monsters and Men’s peppy ho-hey folk and Alt-J’s kitchen-sink clutter -- and that’s only counting for the years following Mechanical Bull. Kings of Leon’s classic-rock-indebted formula may have proven most reliable in the end, but it’s nowhere as novel.

More than musical evolution, the most outdated Kings of Leon-related piece of media from the 2010s is arguably the band’s presence on the 2011 lineup of Coachella. There, the name sits as one of the four headliners of the festival, which also booked Arcade Fire, Kanye West and The Strokes as the weekend’s big names. That poster in retrospect looks like an artifact when comparing the representation of popular music then and now. I will get into festival trends and headliners more in the other years, but Kings of Leon got in before the doors closed for rock music, at least the type of rock music that the band continued to celebrate as the decade went on.

See also: “Barricade” by Interpol; “Tighten Up” by The Black Keys; “You and Your Heart” by Jack Johnson