Thrasher

With The Killers, Brandon Flowers has led thousands of sing-alongs of “Mr. Brightside”, “Somebody Told Me” and other millennial anthems—but now he’s trading in stadium rock for something with a lot more twang. <i>THRASHER</i>, his third solo album, is a confident country project that shines a spotlight on Flowers’ long-time reverence for folk, bluegrass, mariachi and panoramic songwriting that’s drawn inspiration from the landscape of the American West for generations. One look at the credits shows how serious he was about ensuring the authenticity of <i>THRASHER</i>: Folk heavyweight David Rawlings, Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith of Dawes, Margo Price and harmonica legend Charlie McCoy are but a few of the players who lend their voices and instruments to the eclectic album. Price and McCoy join for <b>“One of Us”</b>, a jovial but bittersweet tribute to his late brother-in-law; <b>“The Red Ground”</b> features the brassy might of Mariachi Los Camperos de Jesús Chuy Guzmán, while <b>“Tiger’s Blood”</b> nods to the galloping style of early Springsteen and Flowers’ own rock-star gravitas. The lyrics of <i>THRASHER</i> paint several tableaus—of small-town love that fizzles (<b>“In a Heartbeat”</b>), of fateful choices that ruin lives (<b>“Angel”</b>)—but the most compelling are those that render self-portraits of Flowers, pensive and taking stock of where he’s at in his life. He asks tough questions and invokes religion with <b>“Miss America”</b> (“If Jesus really suffered and paid for all this sin/Why do we still feel it again and again?”), and <b>“Does It Ever Cross Your Mind?”</b> shares a fascination with kismet that echoes the spirit of earlier Killers hits (“Of all the corners of the universe/We wound up hand in hand”). He sings of home, and how badly he wants to return to it, throughout—and in a way, <i>THRASHER</i> allows him to write himself back into scenes of suburban life, before fame and the nomadic life of a touring musician took him away.