Sometimes you have to cut loose from the shackles of self-perception to really be free. Nearly two decades into their recorded career,
“The longer you’re doing this, the more you want to take things as far as you feel like they should go,” Caleb observes. “I don’t think any of us realized that this album didn’t have many songs that would fit the radio format. That isn’t something that came into our minds at all. In this day and age, I wish it didn’t have to. It’s a different world.”
“They didn’t try and make us produce radio hits,” he reflects gratefully. “They would let us be completely free artistically, and that’s why you have albums like ‘Youth and Young Manhood’ and ‘Aha Shake Heartbreak.’ Those are weird albums, and we were weird boys. They just released the weirdness and [even though the albums] weren’t very big, they just let us evolve naturally and grow into what we were going to be.
By KOL’s third album, 2007’s “Because of the Times,” the band found itself in transition, the members laying the foundations for a more polished second act. That arrived in earnest with “Only by the Night” , the album that signaled their breakthrough Stateside thanks, in part, to anthemic singles “Sex on Fire” and “Use Somebody.