Kaleo mixes genres, themes & languages on new album, ’Mixed Emotions’

Kaleo‘s new album, Mixed Emotions, will be released Friday. Befitting of its title, the record mixes various genres and styles into the Icelandic rockers’ sound alongside the blues rockers that they’re known for.

“That seems to be my kind of thing when it comes to my albums,” frontman JJ Julius Son tells ABC Audio. “I definitely don’t like to do a single thing, I like to mix it up and have some dynamics to the album, just like our live show.”

Mixed Emotions also finds Julius Son mixing up the kinds of things he writes about, from imagining himself as the eponymous character in the song “Lonely Cowboy” to the observational “USA Today,” which is about gun violence in America. Julius Son, who was born in Iceland and has lived in the U.S. for about a decade, feels like he may bring a “different perspective” to the issues he sings about on “USA Today.”

“Especially coming from an extremely peaceful country,” Julius Son says. “That is why it is shocking to me to witness gun shootings, like, every week on the news. It’s something that I will never really get used to.”

Mixed Emotions ends with a nod to Julius Son’s home country with a rendition of a famed Iceland lullaby.

“It’s literally the first song that I would’ve heard as a child, my mother singing that to me,” Julius Son says. “That song holds a very special place in a lot of people’s hearts in Iceland.”

Kaleo will launch a U.S. tour the same day Mixed Emotions is released, which includes a show at “our favorite venue pretty much in America,” the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado, on Saturday. 

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.