Kings of Leon Found the Fun in Its Fort Worth Debut

Kings of Leon songs don’t immediately scan as joyous. Tightly coiled, brooding, maybe even slightly peculiar, sure, but not joyous.

“Single book of matches, gonna burn what’s standing in the way/Roaring down the mountain, now they’re calling on the fire brigade,” goes the opening lines of “Pyro,” from the band’s 2010 LP Come Around Sundown (an album dearly deserving of a reassessment, but we digress).

But those same ominous lyrics, transposed from a turntable to a near-capacity arena, take on an entirely different energy live, eliciting a knowing roar of appreciation, turning an oblique song about emotional annihilation into a gleeful singalong, phones hoisted high and voices mingling with the sound of a band confident in its ability to walk that tightrope between bleak and beautiful.

Saturday night marked Kings of Leon’s Fort Worth debut, as the Grammy-winning rock group brought its “Can We Please Have Fun” world tour to Dickies Arena (with opener Phamtogram)  for two hours and more than two dozen songs, just the third stop on its U.S. leg, which will stretch deep into 2024. It was the band’s first North Texas gig in nearly three years.
Having spent the summer touring Europe, the core foursome — brothers Caleb, Nathan and Jared Followill and cousin Matthew Followill — and touring members Liam O’Neil and Timothy Deaux were razor-sharp from the opening notes of “Ballerina Radio,” one of eight total tracks from their recently released ninth studio album, Can We Please Have Fun, performed Saturday.

Some of that readiness is, admittedly, muscle memory. Somehow, 20 years have slipped past since Kings of Leon first emerged from the mists of grunge and early aughts New York blog rock. In that relative pop music eternity, the band has, in the margins, dabbled in pulling its classic rock style in new directions, but it always found a way to retain its identity.
Put another way: Whether scuffed up or shined down, Kings of Leon has remained true to itself from 2003’s debut Youth & Young Manhood onward.