Only by the Night

Writing began only days after Because of the Times came out. Jacquire King and Angelo Petraglia produced it at Blackbird Studio in Nashville, with Lowell Reynolds as second engineer. King said the live performances of the main parts of each song went onto 16-track analog tape and were later transferred to Pro Tools for overdubbing and mixing. Crawl was released briefly as a free download from the band's website, and the singles were Sex on Fire, Use Somebody, Revelry (2 March 2009) and Notion. The opener, Closer, has a three-note riff by Jared Followill played through a Boss ME50 pedal that adds an octave sweep recalling a DigiTech Whammy.

It entered the UK chart at number one, selling more than 220,000 copies in the first week, and only Coldplay's Viva la Vida sold more in a first week that year. In the US it debuted at number five and took 48 weeks on the chart to reach its peak of number four. It is certified 2x Platinum in the US, 9x Platinum in Australia, where it was the highest-selling album of 2008, and 5x Platinum in New Zealand. UK sales stood at 2,916,779 in October 2016, and the band says worldwide sales exceed 6.2 million. It won Best International Album at the Brit Awards, was nominated for Best Rock Album at the 51st Grammys, and was Q magazine's album of 2008.

The press was divided. Metacritic gives 63 from 30 critics, and Pitchfork scored it 3.8 out of 10. Pitchfork's Ian Cohen wrote that the band had moved from festival band to arena band, and that Closer set the bar unrealistically high for the rest. In the Guardian, Alexis Petridis said much of the record was unmistakably the work of a band making music with arenas in mind. NME's Gavin Haynes wrote that Closer might be the best thing they had done, and that they were merely one of the best bands of their time, with true immortality postponed. Rolling Stone's Christian Hoard praised Crawl and Sex on Fire and found Cold Desert bland.