Autumn Kings

A grocery store in LaSalle

Autumn Kings began in 2015 in LaSalle, Ontario, a town on the Canadian bank of the Detroit River, when Jake Diab and Joseph Coccimiglio found themselves working shifts at the same grocery store. They have been writing together for roughly a decade since. The band is now a trio with drummer Troy Dawdy, and has relocated across the water to Detroit.

Growing up in signal range of Detroit rock radio shaped what they made. Diab and Coccimiglio have named WRIF and 89X as their formative stations and list KISS, Metallica, Eminem, Three Days Grace, Billy Talent and Sum 41 among the records they wore out; Coccimiglio also claims Fleet Foxes, which is less obvious in the output. Their own shorthand for the result is that it sounds like Linkin Park and Fall Out Boy had a baby — pop-sized hooks bolted to detuned guitars, with rapped verses and screamed lines used as punctuation rather than as the main event.

The geography carried a commercial lesson too. Diab has said that breaking America was 'everything' for a Canadian rock band, pointing to Moist and Sloan, who stayed largely domestic concerns, against Three Days Grace and Nickelback, who cracked the United States first. The band treated the American market as the only one worth planning around.

Eleven years without a label

The independent catalogue runs deep enough that Epiphanies is not really a debut. Silver Screens arrived in 2017, the Electrified EP in 2019, and Book of the Broken — the record that first moved numbers for them — in 2022. Unplugged Sessions followed in 2023, stripping back material that had been built for volume.

A good deal of the early audience came from covers. A hard-rock reading of Ricky Martin's 'Livin' La Vida Loca' travelled well beyond the band's own listenership, and a version of Aerosmith's 'Dream On' did similar work. The touring was assembled the same way, one support slot at a time: Set It Off, Hollywood Undead, Fame On Fire and Melrose Avenue, a three-week European run taking in eight countries including Switzerland, France, Belgium and Poland, and a residency at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit.

Hopeless Records signed them in August 2024, eleven years into the band. Both members have been direct about what the independent years cost — industry politics, rejections, departures from the line-up and legal trouble. Coccimiglio has framed the change in the writing as a change in the writers: early songs chased hooks without much underneath them, and the pandemic years pushed the pair towards material that made a statement rather than just a chorus.

The record that took four years

Epiphanies came out on 18 September 2026 through Hopeless Records: eleven tracks, the first full-length the band has released under a label. It opens with 'Sleep When I'm Dead' and 'Hellbound', puts 'yOunG BLoOds' featuring Howard Jones third, and closes on 'Fell For A Devil'. 'Only Human' was produced by Mike Pepe, whose credits include Taking Back Sunday, and the band has singled it out as the album's thesis — a song about the limits everyone runs into.

The band describes the album as revelations about human nature gathered over four years, written with the stated aim of shaking listeners out of inertia. Diab puts the underlying position plainly: the band believes people have more agency over their circumstances than they credit themselves with. The songwriting trick, by his account, is to set dark subject matter against an upbeat, playful arrangement so that the message lands sideways rather than head-on.

Rock radio moved on the record before it arrived. 'Sleep When I'm Dead' reached number 16 on the US Mainstream Rock chart in 2025. 'Gone, Gone, Gone' went to number 4 on Mainstream Rock and number 24 on Hard Rock in 2026 — the band's first top-five rock radio single, and a first for their label as well. Cumulative streams passed 100 million, and the band has been carried on SiriusXM Octane programming and named among Loudwire's artists to watch.

Autumn 2026: the busiest stretch they have had

The current run is the densest schedule of the band's career. Summer took in Rock Fest at Cadott, Wisconsin in mid-July, Upheaval in Grand Rapids the following weekend — reached after the van broke down en route and a stranger got them there — and Rocklahoma at Pryor over the first weekend of September.

From 16 to 27 September they opened on Black Veil Brides' Vindicatour II alongside Archers and Caskets, playing House of Blues Orlando on 16 September, Brooklyn Bowl Nashville on 18 September, The Fillmore Charlotte on 19 September and House of Blues Cleveland on 22 September.

They move straight onto Skillet's autumn North American tour, which runs from The Fillmore Philadelphia on 2 October to House of Blues Orlando on 10 November, taking in MGM Music Hall at Fenway in Boston on 7 October, The Fillmore Detroit on 11 October — effectively a home date — Fillmore Auditorium in Denver on 22 October, the Moore Theatre in Seattle on 27 October and YouTube Theater in Inglewood on 31 October. Twenty-one dates are on sale in total. After the Skillet leg there is a radio show, 107.3 Planet Radio Unwrapped in St Augustine, Florida on 1 December, and then Riverfront Revolt at the La Crosse Center in Wisconsin on 30 January 2027, with I Prevail headlining.

Six songs, twenty-five minutes

Nothing about the present live show is designed for a headline slot, because the band is not playing any. The sets are the standard opener's ration and the band has built them accordingly: no interludes, no long introductions, six songs and off. At Wind Creek Event Center in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania on 26 September 2026 the slot ran 6.35 to 7.00pm — 'Sleep When I'm Dead', 'Become Numb', 'Gone, Gone, Gone', 'Only Human', 'Snake Charmer', 'Hellbound'. A near-identical set went out at Brooklyn Bowl Nashville on 18 September. At The Masquerade in Atlanta on 13 September, on a different bill, the six were 'Terrified', 'Power', 'Tongue Tied', 'Snake Charmer', 'Sleep When I'm Dead' and 'Hellbound'.

Across the logged shows, 'Hellbound' and 'Sleep When I'm Dead' are the two fixtures, each documented 34 times, with 'Power' at 31 and 'Terrified' at 25. Linkin Park's 'Bleed It Out' has been played 25 times, and the covers catalogue also draws on Fall Out Boy and System of a Down. Diab's stated approach on stage is not to take the band too seriously; both he and Coccimiglio talk about the goal as sending a room out with more energy than it came in with. The consistent note from audiences is that the vocals hold up without studio help, and that the band lands harder in a room than on record.