The guy from the Killers caught the country music bug. Killers frontman Brandon Flowers has released a couple of solo albums over the years, the most recent of which was 2015’s quietly excellent The Desired Effect. We last heard from the Killers when they released Pressure Machine in 2021. In 2023, Flowers said that he’d scrapped an entire halfway-done Killers album. After teasing something new, Flowers is now ready to announce the new solo LP Thrasher, which he’s explicitly framing as his “country/western” album.
Lots of big stars have gone country over the past few years, as the genre’s popularity has boomed. But Flowers is a Mormon from Nevada who’s been wearing cowboy hats in public for at least two decades; this doesn’t seem that out of character for him. Flowers recorded Thrasher with two producers, Kacey Musgraves collaborator Shawn Everett and Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado, at Nashville’s famed RCA Studio A last July.
Working on Thrasher, Flowers brought in a number of legendary Nashville studio musicians, including Gillian Welch collaborator David Rawlings and 85-year-old harmonica great Charlie McCoy. In a mythic-looking album trailer, Flowers reaffirms his love of rock and new wave and continues, “I’ve unlocked a room that feels like it’s been waiting for me all along — country/western music, my father’s music. It has offered itself to me, and the stories that I have to tell at the moment, with a breezy enthusiasm.” A press release claims that it’s inspired by Flowers’ childhood in Nephi, Utah.
Flowers hasn’t shared any of the songs from Thrasher yet; lead single “Plans” is set to come out on Friday. But we hear a bit of one song in that album trailer, and it honestly just sounds like a Killers song with additional pedal steel. Works for me! Check out that trailer and the Thrasher tracklist below.
TRACKLIST:
01 “Does It Ever Cross Your Mind?”
02 “One Of Us”
03 “Tiger’s Blood”
04 “Plans”
05 “Paradise”
06 “Miss America”
07 “Angel”
08 “The Red Ground”
09 “In A Heartbeat”
10 “An American Dream”
Thrasher is out 8/21 on Island. Pre-order it here.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source stereogum.com ’
