The Killers
Olivia Bee
There’s a battle raging inside Brandon Flowers.
For years, the Killers frontman has played dual lead roles: the boisterous, cocksure heartthrob at the helm of one of the biggest rock bands of the 21st century, and the yearning, spiritual nomad with an eye toward eternity. “There’s sort of been a tug of war in my soul for my whole life with that,” Flowers says over the phone from his home in Park City, Utah. “I think being raised a Mormon in Las Vegas had a lot to do with that.”
Flowers further explores that dichotomy on the Killers’ new album, Imploding the Mirage (out Aug. 21), which doles out bombast, introspection and ironclad hooks in equal measure. “Caution” and “My Own Soul’s Warning” split the difference between glam-pop sheen and arena rock grandeur, while the band slips into languid country-rock on “Blowback,” soft rock mysticism on “Running Towards a Place” and new wave swagger on “Fire in Bone.” The lyrical themes are simple but universal: love, faith, the desire to escape from the shackles of your hometown. And the songs sound larger than life, begging to be shouted from the tallest mountains—or, more realistically, blasted from festival stages across the world as fireworks explode in the distance.
If 2020 had gone according to plan, the latter would be happening right now. The Killers announced a massive 2020 world tour—festivals and stadiums across Europe, arenas across North America—in mid-March, right before coronavirus put all live music on hold. The ongoing pandemic forced them to reschedule their European dates for 2021 (North American dates are still pending) and push the release of Imploding the Mirage from May to August due to mixing delays.
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With a new album in the can and nowhere to go, the Killers found themselves with a lot of unexpected free time on their hands. So they wrote another album.
“I was hitting the gym, I was doing my voice lessons, I was having suits made, I was getting ready for tour. And then everything just got shut down. And it was like, what do I do?” Flowers says. “So instead of going on tour, I went back to writing, and it was a pleasant surprise just because I had never done that before. I had already been working those muscles out, and songs just came a lot more naturally than usual.”
Flowers estimates the band has 11 songs ready for a new album, which they worked on during two weeklong studio sessions in California and Las Vegas. “I really think it’s gonna be a fast turnaround,” he says. “I’m guessing shorter than a year.”
That’s a stark contrast from the belabored early sessions for Imploding the Mirage, which marks the first Killers album written without co-founding guitarist Dave Keuning, who took a hiatus from the group in August of 2017 and hasn’t played with them since, despite technically still being an official member. (Bassist Mark Stoermer has also assumed a limited role since 2016 due to a 2013 pyro accident that left him with hearing damage, though he wrote and recorded parts of Imploding the Mirage and is expected to play select shows in the future.)
In Keuning’s absence, Flowers and drummer Ronnie Vanucci Jr. teamed up with producers Shawn Everett (Kacey Musgraves, Alabama Shakes) and Jonathan Rado of indie-rock duo Foxygen, while Weyes Blood (the moniker of psych-pop singer/songwriter Natalie Mering), the War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, K.D. Lang and ex-Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham all lent their talents to the album. Buckingham’s searing guitar solo rockets “Caution” into the stratosphere, while Mering and Lang deliver breathtaking vocals on “My God” and “Lightning Fields,” respectively.
“I didn’t tell [Lang] this, but she’s representing my late mother,” Flowers says of her appearance on “Lightning Fields.” “I didn’t know if that would turn her off or not. That’s my mom talking to my dad.”
Mering and Lang contributed to the album’s “female component,” as Flowers puts it. “Early on, a theme started to develop, and I started to see that I wanted the record to be about two people becoming one and two people becoming eternal,” he says. “And on the cover of the album, which we had early on, there are these two sort of celestial beings on the cover, a man pulling this woman out of the storm. And I started to see parallels in my own experience with my wife.”
Lyrically, Imploding the Mirage is a continuation of 2017’s Wonderful Wonderful, which dealt with Flowers’ wife Tana’s struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet while Wonderful Wonderful was largely marked by sorrow and pain, Imploding the Mirage is brimming with triumph, joy and—in a surprising new development for the Killers—romance. “My God, it’s like the weight has been lifted,” Flowers thunders on “My God,” and on “Dying Breed,” he vows, “When everyone’s compromising, I’ll be your diehard / I’ll be there when water’s rising, I’ll be your lifeguard.”
The album cover—Thomas Blackshears’s Dance of the Wind and Storm—became the band’s creative beacon while making Imploding the Mirage. They printed copies and hung them throughout the studio. “The producers were looking at it while they were cosmic-diving for vibes,” Flowers says. “I was looking at it while I was stuck on lyrics, and Ronnie was looking at it while he was playing the drums, and the food runners were looking at it when they were bringing food. It was just inescapable.”
The meaning of Imploding the Mirage is two-fold. There’s the obvious, tongue-in-cheek nod to the famous Las Vegas Strip casino, but it also reflects Flowers’ decision to leave Vegas in 2017 and relocate to Park City, about an hour from where he spent his childhood.
“We were accustomed to landmarks of our life being imploded, places that our grandparents used to work or that we would go get breakfast on Christmas morning,” Flowers says. “They implode things in Las Vegas. So I used that analogy for my move out of Las Vegas. I think it’s about growing up, about realizing what’s important in your life. And instead of replacing it with another mirage or another facade, replacing it with something eternal and real.”
Flowers attributes the album’s eternal perspective to the lessons he’s learned as a practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. “It’s kind of a tightrope,” he admits, “to walk that line and not go too far into Christian rock.”
But the singer insists those kernels of spiritual longing have been there since the Killers’ 2004 debut, Hot Fuss—specifically on the soaring “All These Things That I’ve Done”—and were fleshed out on Sam’s Town, whose lyrics were peppered with religious imagery. “I just had such a reverence for people like Bono and Johnny Cash and people that had pulled it off, and I was still trying to find my way at that point,” Flowers says of his band’s early albums.
Nearly 20 years and six albums into their career, the Killers remain one of the few rock acts that can still pack stadiums and fetch six-figure sales in their first week. Imploding the Mirage has already made a big splash on alternative radio, with “Caution” topping Billboard’s Rock Airplay and Alternative Airplay charts. Flowers can’t wait to finally release the album, and he’s champing at the bit to play these new songs live, where the Killers thrive.
“I think that experience is just never gonna go away,” he says of rock shows. “We are definitely from a different time, and we’ve got one foot in those traditions … and the other one looking forward to the future.”
As for that lifelong tug of war inside Flowers’ soul?
“Eventually, I think the faithful soul searcher’s gonna win.”
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