THRASHER Brandon Flowers

• 1 Does It Ever Cross Your Mind? 03:11
• 2 One Of Us 03:18
• 3 Tiger's Blood 04:10
• 4 Plans 03:51
• 5 Paradise 03:46
• 6 Miss America 04:55
• 7 Angel 05:02
• 8 The Red Ground 04:06
• 9 In A Heartbeat 04:40
• 10 An American Dream 05:43
• Total Runtime 42:42

Info for THRASHER

Brandon Flowers will release THRASHER, his first solo album in over a decade, August 21, 2026 via Island Records. Recorded in Nashville at Historic RCA Studio A with longtime producers Shawn Everett and Jonathan Rado, THRASHER features many of Music City’s most renowned players, including longtime Gillian Welch collaborator David Rawlings on guitar, prolific and influential pedal steel player Bruce Bouton, and Charlie McCoy, the legendary harmonica player whose signature playing graces all four of Bob Dylan’s iconic Nashville records. Rooted in his formative childhood years in the small town of Nephi, Utah, the timeless sonic approach proves to be the ideal home for Flowers’ most personal and vulnerable songwriting yet.

We all know the story, fittingly mythological: a man raised in the seedy glimmer of casinos, destined for rock ‘n’ roll stardom. But before that, Flowers was a teenager in small-town Utah, taken with the new wave and post-punk and Britpop his brother had shown him, yet spending just as much time driving the countryside with his dad and hearing Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings songs reflect his surroundings back at him. Those seemingly disparate influences have converged in Flowers’ music for twenty years, but he only rarely wrote about that chapter of his life. As he entered his forties, he began reflecting not only on the whirlwind of his adulthood as a rockstar, but also on his formative years in Utah. Ideas swirled, then arrived in the form of the music that first taught him about storytelling. They culminated in THRASHER.

Though Americana and Western stylings have often mingled with the alternative traditions in The Killers’ DNA as far back as their 2006 sophomore outing Sam’s Town all the way on to Pressure Machine, Flowers found that he’d tapped a new, rich vein of his songwriting: “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,” he says.

It was only an idiosyncratically and eternally American form that allowed Flowers to find the grain and gravity he needed. He wrote honky-tonk ragers, highway rambles, and winsome ballads, all lived-in and organic. Much of THRASHER features songs written in persona thinly veiling stories about Flowers’ friends and family from his teenage years until now, all rendered with the balance of sadness and humor inherent to country music.

The album kicks off with “Does It Ever Cross Your Mind?” Buoyed by a loping rhythm and pedal steel, Flowers sings of the happenstance beauty in how the cosmos places us next to the people with whom we spend the rest of our lives. Though each song emerges from love in some form, many catalogue darker events: “One Of Us” acts as tribute to a brother-in-law who suddenly passed several years ago, while “Miss America” slows it down to travel from ‘80s shopping mall pageants to fraught early childhood memories. There are classic American parables of lofty dreams that didn’t quite take in the intimate cinema of the dusty orchestration in “Plans.” Simultaneously poignant and tongue-in-cheek, “Paradise” pulls from Flowers’ extended family working and aging in the casino ecosystem of Vegas. Mariachi horns and sunburnt guitar evocatively conjure the “Red Ground” namechecked in its title, while “Tiger’s Blood” returns to the Utah glimpsed on Pressure Machine with a seamless blend of THRASHER’s rough-hewn aesthetic and Flowers’ customary arena-rock scope.

In its final moments, THRASHER throws it all together in the phantasmagoric “An American Dream”: Flowers remembers his mom while watching his dad near the end of his life, passes billboards talking about eternity, meets Elvis in a Tesla, and asks him if it was all worth it. Though psychedelic in nature, the song is littered with references to Flowers’ life, a grand finale to an album of aged family photographs and snapshots from across the decades. In the end, THRASHER is a heartfelt and adventurous document of all the people Flowers has known and loved and feared, but also a portrait of a man making peace with himself and the places, sights, and sounds that made him.

Though psychedelic in nature, the song is littered with references to Flowers’ life, a grand finale to an album of aged family photographs and snapshots from across the decades. In the end, THRASHER is a heartfelt and adventurous document of all the people Flowers has known and loved and feared, but also a portrait of a man making peace with himself and the places, sights, and sounds that made him.

Brandon Flowers

Brandon Flowers
was the most popular frontman of the new wave revival, which swept through America and England during the early 2000s. As frontman of the Killers, he helped popularize a genre that hadn't been fashionable for nearly two decades, drawing influence from a number of '80s synth pop bands — including New Order, Echo & the Bunnymen, and the Psychedelic Furs — while writing the songs that comprised his band's multi-platinum debut, Hot Fuss. Flowers also proved to be a super-sized media personality, gathering headlines for his clothing choices (which ran the gamut from neatly tailored suits to bizarrely feathered shoulder pads) and controversial, outspoken opinions on rival bands. Although the Killers retooled their sound with each album, the group rarely subscribed to convention — and Flowers, who launched a solo career in 2010, seemed happy to be the most unconventional of them all.

Flowers grew up in the Southwest, spending his first eight years in the Las Vegas suburbs before moving to Utah with his parents. He returned to Las Vegas several years later, where he finished high school and landed a job working as a bellhop at the Gold Coast Hotel. He began spending his free time playing keyboards in a synth pop band, although he lost his position in the group when his bandmates all relocated to Los Angeles in 2001. Flowers remained in Las Vegas and began working with local guitarist Dave Keuning, with whom he pieced together a new band that relied on guitars as much as keyboards. The Killers' lineup was officially cemented in August 2002 with the arrival of bassist Mark Stoermer and drummer Ronnie Vannucci, and their glossy debut album — released on both sides of the Atlantic in 2004 — made the Killers one of the decade's biggest pop bands.

With their open-armed embrace of synthesizers, icy atmospherics, and other trappings of the '80s, the Killers were placed into the same retro category as groups like Franz Ferdinand and the Rapture. For the band's second album, though, the guys shifted their focus to the heartland rock & roll of Bruce Springsteen. Released in October 2006, Sam's Town found Brandon Flowers modeling his performance after the Boss and Bono, and the album (although not as popular as Hot Fuss) went platinum across the globe. While on tour the following summer, Flowers had his first son with wife Tana Mundkowsky, whom he'd married two years prior.

After releasing a rarities compilation, Sawdust, in late 2007, the Killers began working on a third album. Day & Age arrived in November 2008 and became another worldwide hit, with 'Human' hitting the Top Ten in several countries. Flowers' second son was born while he was on the road in support of Day & Age, and his mother passed away in early 2010. Both experiences inspired him to keep writing, and he decided to launch a solo career later that year while the rest of the Killers enjoyed a short hiatus. Flamingo, his first album of solo material, was released that fall. Flowers returned to the Killers for 2012's Battle Born but resumed his separate solo career in 2015 with The Desired Effect, a record produced by Ariel Rechtshaid.

This album contains no booklet.