The Killers - Imploding the Mirage (August 21, 2020) Album • Page 9

Sam's Town
Hot Fuss
Day & Age
Wonderful Wonderful
That one song the did for the Spiderman 3 soundtrack
Battle Born

 

Sam's Town
Battle Born
Hot Fuss
Day and Age

Huge drop

Wonderful Wonderful

 

I legitimately almost fell asleep driving listening to Battle Born. I'm stunned by all the love for it.

 

Yea i tried BB again & its still a snooze for me

 

Did they finally change the album art for this? Saw some tshirts for sale with a different image on them that they’re calling “album art t’s”

 

Yes, it's the Blackshear painting. They've been using his other art for the other singles.

 

Did the killers inadvertently write the "coronavirus breakout anthem" with Caution? haha

I'm throwing caution
What's it gonna be?
Tonight the winds of change are coming over me
If I don't get out
Out of this town
I just might be the one who finally burns it down
I'm throwing caution
I'm throwing caution
I'm throwing caution
I'm throwing caution

'Cause it's some kind of sin
To live your whole life
On a might've been
I'm ready now

 

I personally prefer it over the last two record titles.

 

1. Sam’s Town by a landslide
2. Hot Fuss

.. then it’s just a huge drop in quality and not even worth listing since I kind of view them the same (a few decent tracks and the rest is filler). I did really like “Caution” so I’m mildly excited for the new record.

 

Live Q&A at 3:00PM.

 

Some really great questions. Brandon finally admitted leaving the Desired Effect off that album was a major fuckup, haha.

 

Brandon also said that the next single called would be released (hopefully) on June 12th titled 'My Own Soul's Warning'

 

Yep, feels like a more distilled Never Get You Right

 

It's a bit awkward to say, I'll admit. But the Killers for me have always been this strange mix of sincerity and artifice, and Imploding The Mirage fits perfectly into that image.

It's nice browsing this thread and seeing so many different opinions on favourite albums. To personally answer the "why don't people rate Battle Born" question, it marked the point where they started sounding like an "old" band to me, rather than the attention-grabbing artists of my generation. It's pretty ballad-heavy and samey, and full of lyrics reinforcing a theme that things used to be better in the good old days. "Your boys have grown soft / and your girls have gone wild" especially is peak get-off-my-lawn territory. All this might sound unfair, but that can be hard to vibe with as a college student, which I was at the time. It's slowly growing on me, and you get a tighter 45 mins if you remove your two least-favourite tracks and add in Carry Me Home, which is a nice stylistic transition from Day & Age. Also, Be Still into Battle Born is a great way to close a record - honestly the album's high point for me.

Wonderful Wonderful felt like an improvement at first, especially as the band try so many different things, like the dark, Tranquilize-ish title track and the forays into straight funk and ambient influence. The lyrical themes around perceptions of masculinity are pretty neat too. But overall it comes across as disjointed, and a record I don't see many people loving front-to-back. I think the album also misses Dave's guitar and, as people have pointed out already, it's got nothing on The Desired Effect. Nowadays I probably put it on a par with Battle Born, with the added memory of my dad's first concert being a leg of the Wonderful Wonderful tour.

Day & Age itself is a record I really rate, although I might be biased seeing as it's the first Killers album I bought. There's a cool night-time vibe, and the sheer variety of instrumentation while still sounding like the same band is hard to pull off. It does tail off near the end - I think The World We Live In might be their blandest single choice ever, that or Here With Me (also, Goodnight Travel Well doesn't fit IMO). That doesn't really matter to me because you can add in the B-sides from that time which are all stellar. Tidal Wave makes for an amazing closer, and A Crippling Blow plus the Bright Eyes cover pair nicely along with Neon Tiger into this spacey synth-western atmosphere the album settles into.

Re. the early fan favourites, Sam's Town is their best album IMO. Rewards repeated listens, no clear dips in quality, and actually quite musically dense once you start unpacking all the layers. Read My Mind, When You Were Young and This River Is Wild are career highlights. Hot Fuss is frustrating to me - I rarely listen to the album in full now, as I think it's got some of their worst songs near the end. That 5-song run at the start, though - wow. Undeniably put them on the map.


All that said, really excited about Imploding The Mirage! Overall I like Caution and Fire in Bone, and was absolutely floored by the Dying Breed clip. With this extra fire and raw passion in the vocals, and synth lines coming back as main hooks rather than just texture, I think this album's shaping up to be the Sam's Town sequel Battle Born should have been.

 

I now relinquish all communication duties of my opinions on the killers to you since you nailed it

 

The themes of fading youth on Battle Born are precisely why I love it so much. It came out in the fall of my senior year of college and it felt so fitting, especially stuff like "From Here on Out."

 

Sorry but I don't see how that is the theme of Battle Born. "Flesh and Bone" is a forward-looking song, reckoning with mortality and preparing for a fight.

"Runaways" is a teenage love song in the vein of Romeo and Juliet, Springsteen's "The River" or "Brown Eyed Girl." It's about two people who saw their future together and jumped on it right away, maybe too soon.

Even "The Way It Was" isn't even really about any "good old days" within anything but the specific relationship in the song -- "If I go on with you by my side, can it be the way it was when we met? Did you forget all about those golden nights? All of our plans have fallen through, sometimes a dream don't come true."

"Here With Me" is similarly a want-you-back song. Following a break-up, the narrator reminisces on the brief nature of their relationship -- got together too young, burned bright while it lasted, etc.

"A Matter of Time" is about someone in a current relationship worried about the inevitable end but willing to fight against it. He's looking at what they had when they began and what they've grown into and he doesn't like it. In the bridge, he encapsulates the realization that it's over/the begging for it not to be/the daring her to be the one to do it: "We found ourselves a place, we belong in it forever. Ain't that what it's all about? Make a promise and keep it, hell or high water, we'd figure it out. It was the night, it was the moon, it was the green grass in the garden, the victory and the sin. I know you're weary, look at me flailing in the corner, here's the towel, go on, throw it in."

"Deadlines and Commitments" is a pretty straight-ahead I'll-be-there-for-you song in the vein of James Taylor's "You've Got A Friend" - "You just call out my name, and you know wherever I am, I'll come running, to see you again" -- or The Pretenders' "I'll Stand By You" or even something like contemporary Brett Dennen's "Sydney (I'll Come Running)". 'If something bad happens to you, something seriously bad, I will be here to help you.' It's a top-notch friendship song.

"Miss Atomic Bomb" is another about-to-break song. It's written more from the perspective of savoring the last days even as they are happening right now. It's about an interloper in a relationship who has changed her for the worse and now it's going to go off the rails.

"The Rising Tide" is again about inevitability. Lies and deception will eventually catch up to you, you can't escape them.

"The Heart of a Girl" is about the beginning of a relationship, about the courting and the patience. It's key that the background of the song is littered with the dreams of people coming to Las Vegas to try and 'make it' - the waiters and dealers trying to get their foot in the door. It's a line between someone believing in themself then trying to turn that belief into something greater and a relationship where both sides believe in the union. Because he's still caught up in the early days, he's somewhat naive, and he looks around at the world he's living in and wonders "what happened here? What is this world?" The outro is a declaration of the ongoing fight:

"And deep in my heart, in any game
On any mountain, no I'm not afraid
Standing on stone, you stand beside me
And honor the plans that were made"

"From Here On Out" is looking forward at a difficult road ahead. It's sort of about expectations based on what you've done compared to what the reality is going to be moving forward for someone who has been less than genuine up to this point.

"Be Still" is an attempt at inspiring somebody that the narrator knows can do better. It says that no matter how bad the world treats you, "don't break character, you've got a lot of heart."

"Battle Born" as a closer is telling: it's about getting back up to fight, coming back from a blow, and still being willing to fight. It's about things that didn't go the way you thought they would have and not letting that stop you from trying your hardest to make them that way.

The album as a whole is about gambling and taking a risk. It's about your expectations meeting the reality, as in "The Rising Tide": "before the truth and the dream collide" or "Be Still": "is this real or just a dream." He's looking at what he thought would have happened based on the potential of early days and he's not seeing the same future. It reminds me of the sometimes muddled but still interesting Brad Bird movie Tomorrowland: in the '50s, America had this vision of what the future was going to be. They looked at themselves and despite the brokenness there, they saw the potential for much more. But that fruit never bloomed, the future isn't what we thought it was, but it still can be. Just because things didn't work out the way we thought they would doesn't mean we shouldn't keep fighting for what we believe in. It's about looking at broken potential and still trying to fix it. I believe what you've mistakenly identified as an album about "what used to be" is actually an album about "what could've been."

 

Thanks for such a detailed reply! That's a great point, that while there's dissatisfaction that life has turned out worse than imagined, the main "message" is more about resilience in the face of that.

I'm glad Battle Born means so much to some people - like I said, I think it maybe has the strongest ending to any Killers album with the last two tracks, and Be Still especially has helped me through tough moments - but I have high expectations for the band and I still maintain it's one of their least vital records. As well-turned and professional as songs like The Way It Was are, it's the closest they come to sounding like Generic Arena Rock Band #274, which is a shame because they've got lots of weird idiosyncrasies. Ronnie's drumming is maybe the most straightforward too. And Here With Me is a career low IMO.

If I had to do a ranking (chucking in Brandon's solo records because why not), it would go from best-to-worst like:

Sam's Town
Day & Age = The Desired Effect
Hot Fuss
Wonderful Wonderful
Battle Born
Flamingo

 

Here's a good chunk of that Q&A from last week. I believe the first five minutes are already on YouTube.

 

@inkwisitive I'm convinced I met you before and drunkenly talked to you way too much about BB and you took notes and you are now using said notes to craft posts on this thread. starting to freak me out. haha .

 

Lol - unless you happened to record an ASMR/sleep podcast where you spilled your heart about Battle Born, I guess we just want the same things from The Killers

 

Pretty weak interview, but album will “definitely” be out in July.

 

Looks like next week for My Own Soul's Warning? But man, this preview sounds gooooood.

MOSW Preview *Spoiler* : TheKillers