Kings Of Leon returned to the stage on Friday for the first time since Caleb Followill’s “freak injury” – watch footage below.
The band were forced to cancel a run of UK and European shows this summer after the frontman underwent emergency surgery in May after shattering his heel while playing with his kids.
He said at the time that doctors had told him that he would be unable to play live for eight weeks, but on Friday (July 18), he and the band made their return at a huge show at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
It was the first of three dates the band will play alongside Zach Bryan at the venue, with sold out shows also taking place on Saturday and Sunday (July 19 and 20). Check out fan-captured footage of Kings Of Leon’s performance below.
Kings Of Leon played:
‘Knocked Up’
‘Manhattan’
‘On Call’
‘Nowhere To Run’
‘The Bucket’
‘Waste A Moment’
‘Sex On Fire’
‘Mustang’
‘Revelry’
‘Beautiful War’
‘Pyro’
‘Closer’
‘Back Down South’
‘Use Somebody’
It was Kings Of Leon’s first live performance since a show in Monterrey, Mexico in early April, and the band will now go on to play a number of shows this summer, including another with Zach Bryan in San Francisco on August 15.
They then head to Europe for a number of festival appearances – at Come Together Festival in Newcastle on August 22, Victorious Festival in Portsmouth on August 24 and Electric Picnic in Ireland on August 31. They also play stadium shows in Fornebu, Norway on August 27 and in Paris on September 3. Find any remaining tickets for the shows here.
When sharing news of his injury in May, Followill teased that the band intend to premiere new material in shows this summer. “We were so excited, we’ve been preparing for this tour for a long time… We’ve been in the studio recording, we have a bunch of new songs, we were going to debut a few of them on this run,” he said. “We had a lot of exciting things planned and now we’re going to have to pivot and find a new way to continue the work that we’ve started.”
The shows this summer are in celebration of Kings Of Leon’s ninth studio album, ‘Can We Please Have Fun’, which was released last May. That record was given four-star review from NME and described as “easily KOL’s most promising, liberated record for over a decade”.
