Kings Of Leon bassist Jared Followill says a new album will be finished early next year.

In an interview with BBC 6Music, he said: We are in the writing process right now and it’s coming along pretty quickly. We’ll definitely get into the studio but we you know we have no plans of finishing it this year but definitely early next year, so I think people should expect something from us sooner rather than later.

The Tennessee-based band are working on what will be their sixth album, following 2010’s Come Around Sundown. In August, Jared reported that frontman Caleb Followill was writing for the new album. “Caleb has been writing a lot, and yeah, I think it’s going to go really well,” he said.

The news follows a fractious period for the band. In 2011, they were forced to cancel their entire US tour after Caleb stormed offstage in Dallas and was deemed too ill and exhausted to tour.

His bandmates were later plagued by rumours that they wanted to kick him out of the band and were forcing him to go to rehab.

Smoke & Jackal, Jared Followill’s side project with Nick Brown of Mona, release the six-track collection EP1 on October 15.