It is not easy to produce a blockbuster follow-up:
Their last album, 2008’s Only By the Night, sold more than 6.2m copies. They have ascended to the kind of mainstream popularity once chucklingly characterised by Noel Gallagher as the point when “all the dickheads start buying your records”, where one review of Come Around Sundown can unironically complain that it is “unlikely to prompt any stag-night singalongs like Sex on Fire”, as if having your big hit aggressively bellowed at a dead-eyed East European table-dancer by a bunch of pissed, hooting City boys with their ties wrapped round their foreheads was somehow a desirable state of affairs, rather than one that might cause you to immediately consider the benefits of shift-work in a call centre.
via Kings of Leon: Come Around Sundown – review | Music | The Guardian.