Brandon Flowers has announced Thrasher, his third solo album and first in over a decade, due 21st August via Island Records.
The record is a country and Americana album, recorded last July at Historic RCA Studio A in Nashville with producers Shawn Everett, a Kacey Musgraves collaborator, and Jonathan Rado of Foxygen. Though the direction may surprise some, it reaches back to Flowers’ adolescence in Nephi, Utah, where he absorbed post-punk and Britpop through his older brother while riding the countryside with his father, soundtracked by Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.
“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found my way back to my father’s music,” Flowers has said. “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.”
The sessions brought together an exceptional cast of Nashville musicians. David Rawlings, longtime collaborator of Gillian Welch, plays guitar throughout. Bruce Bouton contributes pedal steel, and 85-year-old harmonica legend Charlie McCoy, whose playing appeared on all four of Bob Dylan’s Nashville albums, also features.
The album draws from the lives of friends and family. ‘One Of Us’ honours a brother-in-law who died unexpectedly. ‘Paradise’ mines the bittersweet realities of family members who spent their lives working in Las Vegas casinos. ‘Miss America’ traces memories from shopping mall beauty pageants to difficult childhood moments. The album closes with ‘An American Dream’, a surreal meditation in which Flowers reflects on his mother, watches his ageing father, passes billboards promising eternity and encounters Elvis in a Tesla.
The first single, ‘Plans’, is released this Thursday 26th June. Flowers appears at Newport Folk Festival in July. The Killers’ eighth album is confirmed for 2027.
