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Brandon Flowers' first solo album in over a decade is out now — recorded in Nashville with David Rawlings, Bruce Bouton and Charlie McCoy, and rooted in his childhood in Nephi, Utah.
Brandon Flowers Goes Home: Inside Thrasher, His First Solo Album in a Decade
Brandon Flowers has released Thrasher, his first solo album in over a decade, out now via Island Records. Recorded at Historic RCA Studio A in Nashville with longtime producers Shawn Everett and Jonathan Rado, the record leans further into the Americana and country-Western influences that have run through The Killers' music since 2006's Sam's Town — but this time, they're not just an influence. They're the whole language.
The session players tell their own story: David Rawlings (Gillian Welch's longtime collaborator) on guitar, pedal steel player Bruce Bouton, and 85-year-old harmonica legend Charlie McCoy, whose playing appears on all four of Bob Dylan's Nashville records. It's a deliberate return to source for Flowers, who grew up in the small town of Nephi, Utah, caught between the new wave and Britpop his brother introduced him to, and the Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings his dad played on long countryside drives.
"As I've gotten older, I've found my way back to my father's music — 'Country-Western' (as he called it) — and discovered that the stories I carry really feel most at home in the skin of this beautiful American tradition," Flowers says.
A record built from memory
Thrasher is Flowers' most personal writing to date — songs about the people he's known, loved, feared, and lost, mostly written in persona but thinly veiling real people from his life. "One Of Us" is a tribute to a brother-in-law who passed away suddenly; "Miss America" moves from '80s shopping mall pageants to fraught early childhood memories; "Paradise" pulls from his extended family's decades working and aging in the casino economy of Las Vegas. "Tiger's Blood" circles back to the Utah of The Killers' Pressure Machine, blending the new record's rougher textures with Flowers' arena-scale instincts.
The album closes with "An American Dream" — a phantasmagoric finale where Flowers remembers his mother, watches his father near the end of his life, and meets Elvis in a Tesla to ask if it was all worth it. Psychedelic in tone but grounded in real memory, it's the closest thing the record has to a thesis statement: an artist making peace with the places and people that made him.
Alongside the album, Flowers has shared a live performance video of opening track "Does It Ever Cross Your Mind?" — a loping, pedal-steel-driven song about the happenstance of ending up beside the people you spend your life with.
Thrasher — Track Listing
On the road
Flowers has also announced a run of North American, UK and Irish tour dates through September and October, including stops at Los Angeles' John Anson Ford Theatre, London's Royal Albert Hall, and Austin City Limits — full dates and tickets at shop.brandonflowersmusic.com. No Australian dates have been announced.
Thrasher is out now via Island Records.
Courtesy of Universal Music Australia
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