Killers main man Brandon Flowers might be busy taking his second solo LP ‘The Desired Effect’ around the world, but that doesn’t mean that he’s forgotten about his day job.
Speaking to NME backstage at Austin City Limits festival in Texas this last weekend, the singer revealed that the band had already started plotting album five – their first since 2012’s ‘Battle Born’. “We’re in motion for sure,” said Flowers. “We’re starting to talk and we’re looking at where we’re gonna rehearse and where we’re gonna write and we’re looking at switching it up.”
Pay attention, however, to “switching it up”. While most bands will go into a new album doling out the same tired quotes about “not making the same record twice”, Flowers has backed up his assertions with some self-aware previous album appraisal. “I think we definitely need to do something a little different; we need to turn it on its head a little bit,” he continued. “There are certain things I love [on ‘Battle Born’]. I’m proud of ‘Runaways’, and I’m proud of ‘Be Still’ and ‘The Way It Was’ has some of the best stuff from Dave [Keuning, guitar] and Mark [Stoermer, bass]. But as a whole it wasn’t strong enough.”
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That’s a brave statement to come from the frontman of one of the world’s biggest bands and one that you can’t really go back from. Once you’ve stated that your last record was a bit iffy, then it’s adapt or die under the unimpressed scrutiny of the waiting world.
So, with this mind, it’s now more a question of how the band will change on the next record rather than ‘if’. ‘Battle Born’ was their most stadium-aiming album yet – a record full of U2-sized melodrama that channeled blustering, big-hearted Springsteen sentiments. On the best (according to Flowers, at least) of these tracks, the band steered their ever-present theatricality into a kind of Americana road movie vibe. ‘Runaways’ is the big youthful anthem, the equivalent of sticking your head out of the car window going down the motorway just to feel the wind in your hair; ‘Be Still’ is the emotive ballad that plays in the rainy scene when your heart is tested by an errant lover.
The thing the two tracks share is both a heart-on-sleeve flurry of emotion and a kind of all-American simplicity. Where many of the tracks on ‘Battle Born’ twiddled with the synths of old (‘Miss Atomic Bomb’, ‘A Matter Of Time’) or dealt in overblown theatrics (‘The Rising Tide’), the singer seems to favour the record’s more natural moments. This could be telling: having got his ’80s soft-rock opus out of him in ‘The Desired Effect’, Brandon could be wanting to dial things down a little. The Killers have never really made a stripped-back record, and while we can’t imagine the Vegas boys going totally acoustic (that kind of stuff doesn’t really do so well headlining V Festival), you can imagine them ditching the keyboards and going full-blown Americuh.
Conversely, it’s been a while since the band went back to the more angular jerks of ‘Somebody Told Me’, ‘Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine’ et al from 2004 debut ‘Hot Fuss’. Several of these early tracks have been getting an airing during Flowers’ solo shows (including a live version of the Jacques Lu Cont remix of ‘Mr Brightside’), suggesting that the frontman might not be done with their indie disco strut just yet. Impressively for a record so of its time, the album has aged surprisingly well, with its pomp and stomp still sounding huge in ways that some mid-noughties peers can only dream of. An album that channelled that could strike just the right balance of nostalgia and modern excitement in 2016. Or, you never know, they could throw something completely new at the wall. The Killers go grime, anyone?
Whichever way they decide to go, however, it seems they certainly won’t be standing still. And for a band on their 12th year in the limelight, that can only be a good thing.