CCM First Listen: for KING + COUNTRY’s The Most Beautiful Colors

Don’t be jealous, but we got a first listen to the new for KING + COUNTRY album, The Most Beautiful Colors, arriving September 18.

While its first five tracks have already been released, hearing them within the full album reveals what Joel and Luke Smallbone are actually building: something theatrical, ambitious and ultimately far more personal than its massive production initially suggests.
So, before we get into the songs, here’s the vibe check.

The Most Beautiful Colors is a big record about surprisingly ordinary things. Love. Marriage. Divorce. Death. Aging parents. Family legacy. Even just the daily goals surrounding being a good husband, father, son or brother when life refuses to cooperate with the version you pictured when you were younger.

For all its enormous drums, global rhythms, synths and arena-sized choruses, this may actually be one of for KING + COUNTRY’s most mature records. Many of us in our early 40s are discovering that life’s biggest adventures no longer look like the ones we imagined as teenagers. The stakes are still high, but they are more grounded. Dreams coexist with mortgages. Parents get older. Kids grow up. Marriages require work. People disappoint you. You disappoint yourself.

If there is a larger theme, it is figuring out what it means to live well when nobody’s life turns out perfectly. It also occupies an increasingly valuable space between Christian radio and congregational worship. This is clearly faith-informed music, but it rarely sounds constructed for a Sunday-morning setlist. In that sense, The Most Beautiful Colors feels more Proverbs than Psalms. Its faith tends to emerge through practical stories about the lives we are actually living.

Of course, for KING + COUNTRY has apparently decided the best way to explore their “middle ages” is enough production to fill an arena…but is it enough to fill up 8 shows a week at the St. James Theatre times a week (pun intended). That’s right, a few songs in, I found myself asking a serious question: Is this a soundtrack to a new Broadway musical?

Considering the brothers’ filmmaking ambitions and the onstage spectacles they have become impresarios of, it would not surprise me. This is an album built for the stage.

At first, it almost presents itself as a concept record. Strangely, though, the longer it plays, the more it reminds me of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Not because it sounds anything like the Beatles, but because it establishes a world early on and then decides that world can contain basically whatever its creators want to put inside it. Global rhythms. Boy-band synths. Musical theater. Acoustic reflection. An ’80s keyboard solo. Jessica Simpson…. You read that right.

The record kicks off with what almost feels like a classic at this point. It is hard to judge “World on Fire” as a new song when it has been with us for nearly a year, but it remains a tremendous opening statement. It immediately establishes the album’s global scale and world-music influence. If this album isn’t eventually going to the stage, somebody at least needs to start developing a “World on Fire” Vacation Bible School theme and accompanying mission-trip curriculum.

Paul Simon found his way to world music and allowed it to reshape his sound. Likewise, for KING + COUNTRY has evolved its percussion-heavy approach here, trading some of the digital sheen for a more organic, goatskin beat. The progression feels natural in every sense, but that diversion doesn’t last long.

“Miracle” begins the slow rise of the band’s unmistakable synth sounds back into the record. There is a Greatest Showman quality to its scale and unapologetic optimism. Then, just when you think you understand what it is doing, the song delivers something resembling an ’80s Michael W. Smith keyboard solo. I mean that entirely as a compliment.

“What If I Told You” explodes with heavier melodic textures and unmistakable 2000s boy-band energy. There are moments that feel like they could have landed on an early TobyMac record, filtered through the maximalism that has become uniquely for KING + COUNTRY. While we were given a full first listen, there are some secrets I’m sworn to keep until we get closer to release day.

Without giving away every turn, the rest of The Most Beautiful Colors expands considerably beyond the youth-group-anthem energy of its opening stretch.
Steven Curtis Chapman is smiling somewhere because there is an actual love song on a contemporary Christian record. “Ever and ever before” has ‘first dance at the wedding’ written all over it, and the inclusion of two sets of Smallbones makes the moment even more personal. It is sentimental and sappy, it’s what you want.

And don’t worry, fellow millennial dads. There is a song where the GUITAR is the main instrument. “A Good Man” trades enormous production for acoustic reflection. If “Ever and Ever” owns the wedding-video market, this one is giving milestone birthday or, if we want to get a little morbid, family funeral. And that is really where the album’s larger theme starts making sense. These aren’t abstract life lessons. The Smallbones are increasingly writing about the people sitting around their own dinner tables.

The guests reinforce that approach. We live in an era where mainstream artists appearing on Christian records has become fairly common, but “My Mosaic,” featuring Jessica Simpson, still comes completely out of nowhere and it works. Amid the celebrity and tabloid history surrounding Simpson, it can be easy to forget that her vocal power was, and remains, entirely legitimate. Here she gets more than a novelty cameo. “My Mosaic” gives her room for a genuinely autobiographical performance, and her voice fits remarkably well alongside the  Smallbones.

There are more songs and surprises to talk about when the album arrives, but one thing becomes increasingly clear as it progresses: for KING + COUNTRY is interested in pure audience connection. The lyrics are intentional and direct. They aren’t hiding behind layers of ambiguity. A love song is a love song. A song about their dad is about their dad. A song with Jessica Simpson? Yeah, it starts with talking about being married on reality television.
This is relational music, and it wears its heart on its sleeve.

As always, these songs also appear to have been created with for KING + COUNTRY’s live show already somewhere in the back of their minds. This is a band of spectacle: costumes, theatrical staging and arena-rock drama delivered to a civilized audience. Like many of my favorite arena-sized bands, you cannot completely understand their music until you see it take shape in front of a crowd.

The record is the blueprint. The concert is where the building appears. Although this time, that stage may eventually need to be on Broadway.

The Most Beautiful Colors arrives September 18.