The Killers - Pressure Machine (8.13.21) Album • Page 44

meh. next.

 

I like it

 

Into it. Don’t love the vocal effects though

 

I have not listened yet

 

This song is sick, y’all are wilding

 

Terrible.

 

I feel like this belongs on Panic's Too Young To Live album

 

This doesn’t feel too far removed from some stuff on the Desired Effect, so I’m surprised by the mixed response here based on the love for that album.

 

Most days I think the Desired Effect is my favorite thing Brandon Flowers has ever done (other days I think it's Battle Born) and yeah this sounds similar to the style of the Desired Effect but I find the vocals distracting and don't really care for the chorus in general.

 

Fair enough!

 

It feels like Pet Shop Boys will get a writing credit on this, surely? It's SO "It's a Sin"

 

The Killers' Brandon Flowers says there's more to come after 'Your Side Of Town'

With last year's one-off "boy," and now this new track in fans' hands, one could expect a new album is in the works to follow up the group's 2021 release, Pressure Machine. While not at liberty to discuss exactly what is on the horizon for the band as "it may throw people for a loop," Flowers says he believes more details will be coming in "about a month or so."

This, coupled with his "big announcement soon" comments, and the fact that they usually announce the Super Bowl performers at the end of September, and it is in Vegas...

Yes, I am joking.

 

The Killers "10 Questions" interview (and new single!)

They kind of spill the beans on everything in terms of new music in this interview. Sounds like an EP coming up.

 

I love how much they both love The Getting By, it's so pure

 

I absolutely love The Desired Effect and think 'boy' is a pretty great song too, but I'm just not really feeling this new one at all. It might sound cool live with Ronnie actually playing drums on it. It really doesn't remind me much of anything from TDE aside from maybe "Between Me And You", and I don't think it even sounds that much like 'boy' to be honest.

This sounds like a remix of a Killers song, or what I always would have imagined a Brandon solo project would sound like, even though it's not what he has actually done solo at all.

 

boy is great and it's interesting how they've said now it was the jumping off point for Pressure Machine and the new EP. hella inspirational song I guess

 

An EP called EP? Genius!

 

yea that’s interesting they said the EP release date was yesterday, guess that changed haha

 

I feel like even more than most bands they are the kings of saying they have another whole album in the can and describing it, saying it's coming out soon, and then it never materializes, or the next thing that actually does come out is completely different than what they described.

 

The true kings of this are U2.

 

True. I stand corrected. U2 have been doing this longer than the guys in The Killers have been alive haha

 

Kinda like how Uncut Gems could be Adam Sandler's best movie, but it's not the best Adam Sandler Movie. It's a Safdie brothers movie that he's in.

 

I’m surprised this is so polarizing on here, it totally rules imo. As much as I’ve enjoyed the last 2 albums, I have also missed the more synth-pop side of their sound, and I immediately love how much this leans into that. So instantly catchy and anthemic.

 

Very honest interview with Brandon in the Sunday Times. Not totally sure what to make of what this means for the band moving forward. Rumors going around that Brandon is already in the studio working on new solo stuff.

The Killers’ Brandon Flowers: ‘I’m in a crisis’ The lead singer says he’s had enough of making the kind of music that’s filled stadiums for 20 years. He talks about that controversial concert in Georgia and reveals why the band abandoned its new album halfway through.

Brandon Flowers, singer of the Killers, welcomes me into the garden of a lush Tudor home he is renting in the Cotswolds. It’s all honeyed stone, perfect lawns, prim borders — Flowers surrounded by flowers. This idyll aside, his head is swirling. His band released an upbeat synth-pop song, Your Side of Town, on Friday. It sounds like one of the hits from their debut, Hot Fuss, and was meant to be on a new album, but that is no longer happening. “Halfway through recording I realised, ‘I can’t do this,’” Flowers says. “This isn’t the kind of record. . .” He pauses. “I think this will be the . . .” He stumbles a little. “I don’t think you’ll see us making this type of music any more.” His leg is shaking — I assume from nerves.

Two years ago the band released Pressure Machine, a critically adored acoustic album of tragic tales from Flowers’s youth. It tells the stories of people he knew when he was growing up in Nephi, Utah. Murder, poverty, addiction — a far cry and a hefty dictionary away from a man whose most notorious lyric is: “Are we human/ Or are we dancer?” This, it soon becomes clear, is a star worth £22 million who got back in touch with his working-class roots and is no longer sure exactly who he is. “This is the crisis I’m in,” he says, sighing. “The Killers are my identity and our songs fill the seats, but I’m more fulfilled making music like Pressure Machine. I found a side of myself writing it that was strong. This was the guy I’d been looking for! I’m as proud of Hot Fuss as you can be for something you did when you were 20, but I’m not 20. So I’m thinking about the next phase of my life.”

Flowers, 42, thinks a lot. Even if he was accused of not doing so this month when he invited a Russian fan on to the stage in Georgia, a country partly occupied by Russia, then asked the audience if the man was not their “brother” and was booed. We met before that furore, but he got in touch after the gig. “I had to calm an impossible situation. We want our concerts to be communal and I had no idea words I was taught my entire life to represent a unity of the human family could be taken as being pro-Russian occupation. We’re sad how this played out.” As if he didn’t have enough on his plate. When we meet we discuss the past, present, future, God, death and whether a man in his forties should wear tight leather trousers and sing anthems from his youth. Even after Hot Fuss, which sold more than seven million copies, with Somebody Told Me and Mr Brightside (“Coming out of my cage!”), the hits kept coming. When You Were Young, Human — the band are on a permanent victory-lap world tour and are headlining Reading Festival this weekend.

Yet something, for Flowers, has changed. We sit in a cavernous games room, his head framed by guitars and a taxidermied zebra. He is wearing a T-shirt, arms stage-buff. He keeps on his make-up from the shoot, as if to say this interview is still performance and only his family get to see the real him.

His wife, Tana, 41, and their three sons linger in other wings — the family often stays together when he is on tour. A few years ago Tana was diagnosed with “complex PTSD”; her childhood, spent mostly in Las Vegas, was riddled with traumas. When she hit rock bottom, the family cashed in their chips for Utah, where Flowers grew up. “It was a huge deal,” Flowers says. “But Vegas is haunted for her. So we said, ‘This is not for you.’ Now we have access to medicine and counselling and she’s thriving, thank heavens. But it takes a lot.” Still, I have to ask, why are we in the Cotswolds? A place best known for outstanding natural beauty — and David Cameron. “I feel intimidated in cities,” Flowers says softly. “They are centres of the world, intellect and arts. I don’t belong.” But the last time I saw him he was crooning Tiny Dancer with Elton John at Glastonbury. Surely experiences such as that make him feel he belongs? “Except,” he says, grinning, “people were hoping Britney Spears would do Tiny Dancer instead.” This is true — Spears had covered the song with John after all. “I still have a great deal of inadequacy and don’t know how to overcome it,” Flowers says. He mentions a musician he admires who feels so good about the music he creates that he walks around with his head held high. “I’d like to feel that.”

The Glastonbury duet came about after an invitation from John, only for Flowers to waver because of the high notes. John joked he could do the sillier Crocodile Rock instead, so Flowers backed down and agreed to Tiny Dancer. When I ask the innocuous question of where Flowers sees himself at 76 — John’s age — he tumbles into the bombshell that the Killers may not exist as we know them any more.

Few artists talk like this. Many rest on gilded laurels and make millions simply by replaying old hits. As Flowers moves through his forties and beyond, though, that old him — the one we know — has gone. He talks of the past, when he “fudged a lyric” or a “song didn’t mean anything” — a frequent criticism of his — and says he feels “shame”. He laughs, though. His is not a sob story, more a revelation. “I’m a different person now, it’ll be difficult to go back,” he says. The Killers come with stadiums, but he wants to make quieter music that does not need large venues, let alone a band. “It is a conflict.” He stumbles. “It is just, well, at what point do I make that change? Who in the band wants to do that too? No matter what, there will always be people who look at me and just think of Somebody Told Me. And I get that. But I’m interested in evolving.”

To understand Flowers, you need to understand his hometown Nephi — and Las Vegas. Born in 1981, Flowers spent his school years flitting between the two places. Nephi is so small that it has no traffic lights. It suffers heavily from the opioid crisis. Vegas, on the other hand, where he moved when he was 16, is sleaze and showbusiness and where the Killers formed in 2001, with a shared love for British bands such as New Order, Pet Shop Boys and the Smiths. Then, 20 years ago next month, the band played a pub in London — their first show in Britain — and never looked back. They performed only six songs, including Mr Brightside. Flowers was in awe. “I was still working as a bellman,” he says. Britain took to them and the singer remembers their Glastonbury debut in 2004 (they went on to headline twice) as the turning point. “It was like the Sex Pistols,” he says of that feverish gig, “but it was . . . us.”

I ask what drew the band to our island. Mostly drizzle. “In my head it was overcast,” Flowers says, grinning. “And I was in Vegas with 335 days of sun a year. When we had a cloudy day it felt special and I thought it must feel special in Britain all the time. It was naive, but came at a time in life when I was searching for anything other than what my dad was doing. Now, the older I get, the more I appreciate those things I was running from and so latch on to them. And almost wish I had done so earlier.”

His family live an hour or so north of Nephi now. The name of the city is also that of a figure in the Book of Mormon — the religious text, not the musical. It is another reason why Flowers is drawn there: an anomaly in pop, he is a Mormon and thinks his lyrics and melodies may come from God. Yet with the trauma Tana has suffered and the stories of Nephi that he writes about, surely his faith has been tested? “My faith continues to grow,” he says with his biggest smile yet. “If there is a religious gene, I have it. I know that can sound crazy to people, but America’s becoming more secular and that’s not as great as some think. I grew up hearing things like, ‘No amount of worldly excess can compensate for failure in the home.’ I’m so thankful! Where will people hear that? Not at school or playing sports. Religion can be a beautiful thing, but it’s easy to trash.” He pauses. “This makes me a bit of an enigma as a singer.”

He is not wrong. And this is the Flowers dichotomy. His petals are Vegas and showmanship; his roots Nephi and religion. (He spends his time reading about why people leave his church on “ex-Mormon Reddit”). He calls Nephi “this throbbing light” that he had to investigate, and that past is now his future, telling stories of lives different to his and wondering why he did not end up like they did. He mentions a man he grew up with in Nephi who took his own life. “We were two blocks away, raised similarly,” Flowers says with a sigh. “Then, what happens? Where is the turn?” He says he did not go to the funeral. “I didn’t want to distract from the family’s grief.” He seems at a loss, fixated on why one man dies while his neighbour fronts one of the biggest, most enjoyable bands of the century — and whether that is something he still wants to do. Your Side of Town is out now. The Killers at Reading Festival is on BBC1 tonight at 11.40pm