“Life is the vein that runs through this album,” Kings of Leon frontman Caleb Followill tells Apple Music of his band’s eighth LP. “I wrote songs about youth, I wrote songs about being at the age where everything feels like it's going so slow you want to get out of your reality. A lot of the lyrics are just coming to terms with what’s to come and what has already happened. I don't know what was going on—maybe I was smoking weed or something.” The album covers old age, mental illness, love, Mother Nature—topics dear to us all. Though it was completed months before the pandemic hit in early 2020, When You See Yourself finds the Nashville rock outfit in an especially contemplative frame of mind, setting moods and settling into songs in a way that feels new and organic. It’s a less direct approach—some distance from 2008’s “Sex on Fire,” but just as impactful. “There was a lot of talk about getting back to a place we were earlier, where we made music that we put a little bit more effort and thought into,” bassist Jared Followill says. “And not to say that we didn't on other stuff, but we just talked about respect more than hits—making stuff that we respected and that we thought the people that we respected could respect. We put radio and business on the back burner and tried to make an album that we loved.”