The Killers’ Brandon Flowers Finally Made The Country Album He Spent His Entire Career Waiting For 

The Killers frontman talks Nashville’s RCA Studio A, the brother-in-law he lost, and why he’s embarrassed he didn’t know he was recording in the room where Elvis, Dolly Parton, and Roy Orbison made history

Brandon Flowers spent 20 years building The Killers into arena-filling purveyors of glammy, Britpop-inflected rock. So when word went around that he’d made a country album, even he understood the skepticism. “It might seem strange, but we think you’ll like it,” is how Flowers says the record was pitched to Broken Record’s Justin Richmond. It wasn’t strange at all. Thrasher, out now, is Flowers doing what he calls going “to the heart of it”—decamping to Nashville’s storied RCA Studio A, the room where Dolly Parton, Waylon Jennings, and Roy Orbison once worked, to make the record he’d apparently been circling his whole career.

He Didn’t Know What Room He Was Standing In

Flowers admits, more than once, that he had no idea what he was walking into. His producers pushed for Nashville while Flowers was content to stay in Provo or Burbank. “I’m embarrassed to say it, I didn’t know exactly what transpired just in this room that we were recording in and in the room next door,” he says of RCA. He also didn’t handpick the session players who ended up on Thrasher—among them pedal steel player Bruce Bouton and harmonica legend Charlie McCoy, who played on Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer.” What he did insist on: bringing in his longtime friends Griffin and Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes.

Recording Live for the First Time Since Sam’s Town

For a band built partly on studio polish, cutting Thrasher live with a room full of session veterans was a return to something Flowers had abandoned two decades ago. “I haven’t done that since Sam’s Town,” he says, tracing the shift back to The Killers’ more electronic-leaning third album. Watching the Nashville players make split-second decisions without the arguments that plague younger bands left an impression. “These are guys that have been doing this for 60 years, some of them,” Flowers says. “They know why this is going to work.” He says the experience will shape the next Killers record.

A Eulogy Disguised as a Country Song

The album’s second track, “One of Us,” is built around Charlie McCoy’s harmonica and reads, on first listen, like a warm character study. It’s actually an elegy for Flowers’ brother-in-law, who died a few years ago. “There’s family that you’re born into and then there’s family that you find,” Flowers says. “He was in that category for me.” He credits songwriters like John Prine for the genre’s particular gift: letting “sadness and playfulness kind of walk hand in hand.” It’s a trick Flowers has quietly deployed across The Killers’ catalog too, burying darker material under melodies that took listeners a hundred spins to fully unpack.

Where Petty, Springsteen, and Oasis Actually Meet

Flowers traces his plainspoken, detail-driven lyric style directly to Tom Petty, whom he discovered in earnest during a “strange renaissance” in his mid-20s that also led him to Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits. But the architecture underneath The Killers’ biggest songs, he says, came from Britpop. “Somebody told me Mr. Brightside has these big, prolonged pre-choruses. That’s Noel Gallagher’s book,” Flowers says. “Those other bands didn’t do that kind of stuff as much.” He’d never connected the two influences—Nashville storytelling and Manchester songcraft—until this record forced the reckoning.

Growing Up Mormon in Payson, Utah

Much of Thrasher‘s emotional terrain traces back to Payson, Utah, where Flowers moved at age eight, in a house down the street from where Footloose was filmed. It’s also where his father, a man Flowers says “embodied some of these guys” from the record, underwent a religious conversion in his early forties that reshaped the family. “He was always, I think, a good man, but he became a better man,” Flowers says, recalling a father who once brought a homeless family home to live with them. Flowers, now 45 and a father of three sons himself, says he’s only recently come to see his own emotional sensitivity—not stoicism—as his real inheritance. “I used to think that was maybe a weakness,” he says. “Now I see it as a strength.”

Flowers has also leaned on Johnny Marr, who toured with The Killers and once told him what it meant to watch him play a certain synth line live: “For those 15 seconds, it’s the most beautiful thing that’s happening in the world.” 

A second Nashville-recorded Killers-adjacent album, thematically focused on long-term love rather than romance, is already finished and due out next year. Listen to the full conversation on Broken Record.