Orlando’s Kings County have the kind of résumé that suggests they’ve been doing the work quietly for a while. In 2018, they won an iHeart Radio contest for new original music and landed the opening slot for Bon Jovi at the Amway Arena – not a bad calling card. Since then, they’ve played Blue Ridge Rock Fest and Rock Fest in Wisconsin, building the kind of stage experience that tends to show up in recordings, whether you intend it to or not. “What Now” drops June 19th, produced by Chuck Alkazian – the man behind work with Pop Evil, Chris Cornell, and Trust Company – at Pearl Sound Studios in Canton, Michigan. The song tackles the well-worn territory of a relationship falling apart and finding your footing on the other side, which, in the right hands, doesn’t need to be original to hit hard.
And Kings County has the right hands for it. “What Now” captures that 70s and 80s huge rock wall of sound – the kind where guitars feel like a physical presence in the room, and everything is big by design rather than by accident. The production is dense without being cluttered, and the live feel of the performances is very much intact; this doesn’t sound like a track assembled in pieces, it sounds like a band playing together and meaning it. The real weapon here is the vocalist, who has the pipes to match the song’s emotional register completely. The intensity the track demands gets delivered without strain, which is the difference between a hard rock song that works and one that just makes noise.
“What Now” is the kind of straightforward rock song that doesn’t need to reinvent anything – it just needs to be executed well, and Kings County do exactly that. Sometimes the most honest thing a band can do is write about something everyone has felt and then play it as they mean it.
