Photo: Press/Tumblr/Chris MacDonald

The time is almost upon us. Those lads from Tennesse are stepping up to drop their sixth album and prove what made them a generation's favourite stadium rock and roll band. But will the LP live up to the quickfire fun and fury of their earlier work or seem damp and flat like their last album?

Well, we just don't know yet. Only a couple of tracks have been aired live and beyond the basics, the details of KoL's new album remain pretty scarce - but here's the rundown of what to expect and everything we know about Mechanical Bull so far. 

It'll be out on 23 September
That's a fact, that is. Write that down.

Supersoaker!
Yup, this week the Kings unveiled their brand new single and first official track from Mechanical Bull. Harking back to the free and easy roll of their earlier work, it carries itself like the comfortable, laid back cousin to Four Kicks - but driven by the open anthemics of their last couple of records. If the rest of the album picks up where this leaves us, then it could be something special...

Always The Same?
The other tasty teaser that we've had from Mechanical Bull comes in the form of 'Always The Same (It Don't Matter)'. A fiery little slowly-chugging runaway train with echoes of the band's grungey Because Of The Times Material. If the band pick up the mantle with the quietLOUDquietLOUD dynamic of this, then it's already a hundred times better than Come Around Sundown.

An old friend
The album was produced by Angelo Petraglia, who has worked with the band throughout their career as well as Taylor Swift and The View. Expect some BIG songs. 

Good things come to those who wait?
Speaking of the process of making the record to Zane Lowe, frontman Caleb Followill said, "It feels like it's a shame that we waited so long to do it. We can go in there and rehearse or goof off."
Bandmate Matthew added, "The pressure was really off of us on this last one. We were our own bosses. There were no bills because we bought the studio ourselves, there was no timeframe when it had to be done by. Us being able to take a break, we kind of got to fall back in love with what we loved about it in the first place, which was picking up your instruments and playing and smiling onstage and actually having fun, and not feeling like it's a job."

There's some leftover material for the next album?
In the same interview, the band also hinted that they had enough left over material to start work on another LP straight away as there was, "still a lot of material at the studio waiting" and that the "next record's halfway done, almost".

'No pressure'
  For the first time in their career since skyrocketing to hypermegasuperstardom, the band don't have to live up to their own success. When asked whether they faced pressure in making the album, Caleb said: "I think the last one took the pressure of us; 'Come Around Sundown' followed-up to what was at the point the biggest record of our career [2008's 'Only By The Night'], so going into this record it was like, 'The monkey's off our back, we don't have that pressure of whether we're going to be able to match what the last record did.' We changed it up a bit on this record."

The Best of KoL?
It seems that the record is likely to feature the best parts of all that we love about Kings of Leon. In a recent Twitter Q&A, one fan asked if the new material shared the "rookie" Kings Of Leon sound,  Followill responded: "Not really. There are definitely elements of it. Songs. Not as a whole though. It's a culmination of all of them."
Another fan used the Twitter conversation to ask which of the band's previous records the new LP was most comparable to, to which Followill replied: "Vibe/feeling could be compared to the first couple. It's much more musically complicated though, so I'd have to say the last 2."

 It's 'fun' and not 'mature'
Speaking to NME earlier this year, bassist Jared Followill said:  "I thought we were going to make a mature album but I'm amazed how youthful it sounds. It's like a mix of Youth and Young Manhood and Because of the Times."
He also told Rolling Stone last: "We're just trying to have fun with it and just have a relaxed-type thing."

 

It'll be 'more creative'
Talking about the impact of his side-prokect Smoke & Jackal on the writing on new KoL material, our Jared said: "It got my creative juices flowing again and just doing something completely different, I feel like it can bring more creativity to our band. Caleb has been writing a lot, and yeah, I think it's going to go really well."

Sounds good, no?
If all of the above comes to pass, then it'll be something special. Let's all keep our fingers crossed that we'll be ecstatic enough to get naked like the now legendary Birmingham Sausage Man (AKA Fuzzy Furry Balls)