Here are three immutable facts about Brandon Richard Flowers: he was born just outside Las Vegas, Nevada. And he never does anything by halves. When he and his band the Killers debuted in the early 2000s, as disaffected New York cool was on the rise, he was writing scream-along choruses sung in his upper register.
When the Killers were searching for a sound even bigger and grander than the euphoric Springsteen pastiche of 2006’s Sam’s Town, they didn’t think twice before recruiting Stuart Price to produce the spangly 2008 disco-rock record Day & Age. That’s how you get a record like Thrasher. Flowers’ third solo album finds Vegas’s chosen son decamping to Nashville for a full-throated exploration of country music – not subtle, trendy Americana, but rip-snorting, honky-tonking, Nudie suit-wearing country.
In many ways, Thrasher is a stylistic follow-up to the Killers’ maudlin 2021 Pressure Machine, which saw Flowers explore windswept balladry and tasteful story-songs. But that record was as forgettable as Thrasher is a hoot; Flowers wilts when he doesn’t fully commit, as was the case on Pressure Machine, and he doesn’t make that mistake here. Thrasher features many of Nashville’s most revered country musicians, including pedal steel legend Bruce Bouton, 85-year-old harmonica player Charlie McCoy, Gillian Welch’s musical partner Dave Rawlings and lauded Americana musician Margo Price.
This deep bench doesn’t obscure Flowers’ oddball tendencies. On rollicking opener Does It Ever Cross Your Mind?, he writes like a man who’s done his 10,000 hours absorbing pop music cliches and now feels equipped to write his own. Those weird turns of phrase invigorate Thrasher’s many character studies.
Tiger’s Blood would be good-but-ordinary Springsteen pastiche, with its repeated refrain of “like a runaway train”, but Flowers makes this story of a “cheerleader working the till [who] wants to get outta this podunk place” his own with weird, specific images – of “peach-fuzz boys getting hard in the corner on Mortal Kombat” and a “swamp cooler leaking down the bricks outside”. Especially great is all the idiosyncratic detail on closer An American Dream, its universal-sounding title concealing seemingly the most surreal song on Thrasher. As it builds, Flowers stacks evocative image upon evocative image: “A Guinness World Record holder / For the longest fall living”; “Elvis in a Tesla Model X”; “lights that flicker on hubcap chrome.” As on Pressure Machine, Flowers takes a couple of big swings, both of them misses.
On Miss America, he writes from the perspective of a young woman in an abusive relationship. Although this is something of a pet topic for Flowers, he is not a particularly elegant writer; amid all the salacious euphemisms for abuse, he sings things like: “Truth be told / Grown men have noticed me since I was 12 years old / It always made me feel like some kind of prize / I guess I saw my worth through their porno eyes.” But even that feels graceful in comparison to Angel. There’s no way to sugarcoat it: Angel is a song about a talented Black baseball player who starts dating a white girl.
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