Brandon Flowers Releases New Album THRASHER
Critics have praised the country-leaning record for its storytelling and Flowers' powerful vocal delivery.
The Killers' Brandon Flowers has released THRASHER, his first solo album in over a decade, out 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 85-year-old 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.
Alongside the album, Flowers shared a live performance video of the record's opener, '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.
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.
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.
Tracklist
Does It Ever Cross Your Mind?
One Of Us
Tiger's Blood
Plans
Paradise
Miss America
Angel
The Red Ground
In A Heartbeat
An American Dream
Flowers has also revealed touring plans for September and October in support of THRASHER. The upcoming tour will span dates in North America, the UK and Ireland. General on-sale starts today at 10am local time. For ticketing info, visit https://shop.brandonflowersmusic.com/pages/tour.
All Upcoming Tour Dates
September 1st - The Van Buren - Phoenix, AZ
September 4th - John Anson Ford Theatre - Los Angeles, CA
September 5th - Fox Theater - Oakland, CA
September 7th - Roseland Theater - Portland, OR
September 8th - Vogue Theatre - Vancouver, BC
September 9th - Showbox - Seattle, WA
September 11th - Red Butte - Salt Lake City, UT
September 12th - Ogden - Denver, CO
September 15th - Palace Theatre - St Paul, MN
September 16th - The Riviera Theatre - Chicago, IL
September 18th - Brooklyn Paramount - Brooklyn, NY
September 20th - 9:30 Club - Washington, DC
September 21st - Franklin Music Hall - Philadelphia, PA
September 23rd - Roadrunner - Boston, MA
September 24th - HISTORY - Toronto, ON
October 2nd - Austin City Limits - Austin, TX
October 6th - Wynn Encore Theater - Las Vegas, NV
October 14th - Bournemouth O2 Academy - Bournemouth, UK
October 15th - Royal Albert Hall - London, UK
October 17th - Bristol Beacon - Bristol, UK
October 18th - Nottingham Rock City - Nottingham, UK
October 20th - O2 Apollo Manchester - Manchester, UK
October 21st - Barbican - York, UK
October 23rd - O2 Academy Glasgow - Glasgow, UK
October 24th - O2 Academy Birmingham - Birmingham, UK
October 27th - Olympia Theatre - Dublin, Ireland
Photo Credit: Chris Phelps
Photo Credit: Chris Phelps
