These quotes, along with their dark, murky undertones, construct the feeling of a depressed town where tourists stop only for gas and maybe a meal. While inspired by Brandon Flowers’ hometown of Nephi, Utah, the band intentionally leaves out any defining characteristics so that the listener can fill in the blanks with similar stories and places they have experienced first-hand. As you listen to these disembodied voices tell you about living in the same place for decades and marrying someone straight out of high school, your mind immediately begins to flesh out some dusty corner of America. The record opens with a menacing Godspeed-esque warble over field recordings of people talking about their lives in some unnamed small town. That said, Nebraska is probably my favorite Springsteen record (yeah, I’m one of those guys), so I went into Pressure Machine with my guard up… but I’ll be damned if they didn’t suck me in almost immediately. Sam’s Town is still a classic to this day, and I say lean into your influences. It took them a while (and included a few stumbles), but The Killers have finally figured out who they are in this late stage of their career, and that is a Springsteen worship band.
#The killers discography full#
Lead singer Brandon Flowers even went as far as to explain that, due to the Coronavirus, the release of the Mirage was “the first time in a long time that I was faced with silence, And out of that silence this record began to bloom, full of songs that would have otherwise been too quiet and drowned out by the noise of typical Killers records.” Sounds awfully familiar to me. The signs were all there, and they weren’t subtle this is The Killers doing their Nebraska.
Shortly after the album’s announcement, they released a collab with Bruce Springsteen, and then they unveiled the black and white cross-adorned album cover. When The Killers announced a second, more pensive accompaniment to the soaring open-road indigo of Mirage, we all knew what they were doing. While Imploding the Mirage genuinely feels like a modern Heartland Rock classic, it was just barely edged out by other releases by the time the end of the year rolled around. Mirage hit the sweet spot for me in so many ways it dropped at the peak of an antsy and confined COVID summer, came from a group that I have loved since childhood, represented an artistic return to form, and touched on a genre that doesn’t get enough time in the spotlight. It was so close to making our top 15, in fact, that you can even see the album cover in the header image for that post. I’m going to let you guys in on a little secret Imploding The Mirage just barely missed out on our 2020 Album of the Year list.
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