release feature

Medium Build's King of Having Fun Turns His Own Back Catalog Into Song Titles

The fifth "King of..." album folds an entire prior record into a single track name, and that's the smallest of its structural tricks.

Somewhere in the tracklist for King of Having Fun, there's a song called "King of Dodging Calls." That's not a coincidence or a leftover demo title — Medium Build already released an entire album called King of Dodging Calls. Folding a former album title into a single track on the new one is the kind of self-referential move that only works if you've been building a mythology on purpose, and by album five, Nick Carpenter clearly has been. King of Chaos, King of Dodging Calls, and now King of Having Fun: the "King of..." title isn't a one-off joke anymore, it's a running bit sturdy enough to eat its own history.

The album arrives September 4, 2026, on Island Records, a division of UMG Recordings, under exclusive license to Medium Build, LLC — the kind of label plumbing that signals this is no longer a bedroom-scale rollout. It's Medium Build's fifth studio album, and the tracklist keeps the "King of..." bit running well past the title. Fourteen songs deep, the naming convention becomes almost a structural device rather than a flourish.

## The tracklist plays the bit against itself

Opener "King of Yearning" sets the tone, and from there the "King of..." songs stack up: "King of Dodging Calls," "King of Envy," "King of Schulman's," "King of Freedom," "King of Little Treats," "King of Expectations," "King of Crashing Out," "King of Gratitude." Eight tracks wearing the same crown, cycling through yearning, envy, freedom, gratitude — a whole emotional range filtered through one repeated grammatical joke. Then the album breaks its own pattern with "Home Depot," "In My Gut," and "Armor," plain titles dropped into the middle of all that self-mythologizing. A song called "King of Little Treats" sitting a few tracks from one called "Home Depot" is the kind of contrast that tells you this record isn't trying to be uniformly grand — it's letting the mundane interrupt the mythology on purpose.

That tension lines up with how Island Records frames the record itself. Per the label's press description, the album was written over a summer and recorded live in-studio with close friends and collaborators, and across its fourteen tracks, Carpenter works through friendship, freedom, addiction, anxiety, love, regret, and the pursuit of feeling fully alive. Musically, it's described as blending traces of country, rock, and indie, built around sharp lyricism and emotional transparency — the sound of someone who trusts the songwriting to carry weight the arrangements alone might not.

## A coming-of-age arc with a cautionary undertow

The label's own framing is more specific than typical album copy: King of Having Fun is described as part coming-of-age story, part cautionary tale, tracing an arc from a curious kid to an adult searching for relief in all the wrong places. That's a useful lens for the tracklist's odd rhythm — a record that opens on "King of Yearning" and closes on "King of Gratitude" has clearly mapped some kind of before-and-after onto its sequencing, with "King of Crashing Out" landing exactly where you'd expect a cautionary tale to hit its low point before resolving. Whether that arc plays out the way the sequencing suggests is the kind of thing you can only confirm by hitting play in September, but the shape of it is right there in the running order.

This isn't a debut swinging for a first impression. Medium Build has been laying track for a few years now — the "Rage" single in 2022, the Health EP in 2023, Little Bit Country in 2024, and the "Cuz of U" single last year — each one a data point in the same expanding catalog that King of Having Fun now sits atop as the biggest structure yet.

The rollout also isn't shy about wanting a physical audience. The vinyl LP is up for pre-order now, cataloged under UPC 881061081357 with catalog number 6108139, and it carries an explicit lyrics warning worth knowing before it lands on a turntable at a family gathering. Collectors have decisions to make, too: the format splits across three catalog numbers — 6108139 for LP Indies, 6108135 for LP Black, and 6108140 for CD — meaning the pressing you order determines which version of this record physically exists on your shelf.

Put a fourteen-song album with eight repeated titles, three outliers, and three separate catalog numbers in front of listeners, and the real question isn't whether Medium Build can sustain a bit that long. It's whether "King of..." was ever really the joke, or whether it's just become the only title big enough to hold everything Carpenter's been trying to say since Chaos.

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