A ‘tender’ return
Las Vegas rockers the Killers are back on the scene of a very different world with a new album that reflects troubled times
A lot of people shed tears after boxer Buster Douglas defeated Mike Tyson in 1990 (mostly, those who had bet on the much-favored Tyson). But Brandon Flowers, lead singer of the Killers, cried for a different reason. It was the first time in his young life — he was born in 1981 — that the usual rules of the world seemed to fail, that things did not turn out like he expected them to.
“I think about that fight all the time,” Flowers said, mulling over the childhood shock of that match, which inspired the single “Tyson vs. Douglas” on his band’s new album, “Wonderful Wonderful.” “My view of the world changed. I have three sons around that same age, and so many people have experiences like that, stuff that happened with your dads or sports heroes where you didn’t see them as fallible before.”
The last year (and week) has, obviously, seen shocking events that few people were expecting. Maybe that gives some extra relevance to the Killers’ first new album in five years, a tender yet dramatic look at growing older amid so much uncertainty.
“Wonderful Wonderful” was released just before the shooting that killed 58 people at a country music festival in the Killers’ hometown of Las Vegas. The band finished its record (and this interview with The Times) well before it. But it’s hard to listen to perhaps the most popular band Las Vegas has ever produced without thinking of what happened this week.
Because, for the most part, “Wonderful” is an LP about reckoning with uncertainty and trying to find some ballast in family and in music.
“Some Kind of Love,” the album’s devotional centerpiece, was written for Flowers’ wife, who suffers from PTSD. It’s an entirely new kind of song for the Killers. They’ve long tapped into a very American, archetypal strain of yearning and loss on singles like “When You Were Young,” but for the first time the band truly looked inward for a new angle on those emotions.
“It’s the most tender moment we’ve had,” Flowers said. “It’s definitely me being more vulnerable. But I didn’t feel naked or embarrassed.”
The LP hit the top of the Billboard 200 album charts in its release last week — clearly the fiveyear hiatus since the Killers’ last LP, “Battle Born,” didn’t quell fans’ interest. Other dancier singles hark closer to the band’s 2004 debut, “Hot Fuss,” with sounds drawing from 1970s downtown disco and early ’80s electro-rock.
Lead single “The Man” is also a one-of-a kind addition to their catalog, the most blatantly upbeat thing they’ve ever recorded, but also drenched in self-awareness about their quick rise to stardom more than a decade ago.
Of course, the Killers are returning to a very different world than the one they left. During the five years they’ve been gone from the scene, streaming services throttled the last of full-album sales (“Wonderful” hit No. 1 in large part due to bundling with tour tickets), and hiphop and pop fully tightened their grips on the charts for young fans.
Still, the band has always effectively used electronics to drive its songs, and if any rock band can cope with our current era of genre and commercial confusion, the Killers stand as good a chance as any.
“We’re really fortunate to have such a strong fan base,” drummer Ronnie Vannucci said. “But that’s one of the reasons we worked with Jacknife Lee [the album’s producer, who recently worked with Taylor Swift and U2]. We knew it was 2017 and couldn’t keep doing the same thing.”
The album is, indeed, the Killers’ most varied yet and captures a seasoned band trying to grow into its middle career as the music business (and life in general) seems to be collapsing and reconfiguring in ways no one fully understands yet.
But like the LP’s closer, “Have All the Songs Been Written?,” other tracks try to wrestle with the very idea of music and lineage — seeking to answer the question: What is the point of being a rock band in 2017? Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler played guitar on the song, and for a band with a rapacious knowledge of rock history and unabashed ambitions to join it, the record asks how music can still be a place of healing and refuge.
In the wake of the Las Vegas tragedy — and the death of Tom Petty, one of the Killers’ formative influences and models for evolving over decades in rock — music may be one last reliable place to turn to for a sense of purpose. Even as changes come quickly, and shock after shock keeps happening in America.
“I’m unsure where we fit in, and I’m fine with that,” Vannucci said. “I never see where we should belong.”