Brandon Flowers returns with his long‑awaited studio album THRASHER. Having written some of the biggest pop‑rock anthems of the century with The Killers, his new record excavates his childhood love of country music while preserving his penchant for relatable, heart‑felt writing.
Pedal steel guitars and banjos dress his voice beautifully; tracks like “Plans” and “Paradise” pair his headstrong vocals with an infectious bluegrass swing. While the sound is spectacular, Flowers’ writing adopts the genre’s storytelling tradition to uneven effect. He has nothing left to prove after penning one of the biggest songs in recording history. Yet, there are times his fascination with the West missteps into hilarity. Beyond the grand blast of mariachi horns, “Red Grounds” is as much an ode to the region’s expanse of genre as it is an outtake from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. For better or worse, Flowers is unafraid to play the desperado.
“Angel,” a folk‑rock ballad, meditates on the inescapable truths of systemic tension and poverty. Flowers’ pen is at its most effective as he sequences tastefully broken vignettes: a gifted baseball prospect with a bright future, a young man navigating an interracial relationship in the South, and a cousin doomed to a short life of moving drugs. Still, his portrayals of family, violence, and economic desperation sometimes fall short of insight and lean towards insensitivity. The “chocolate and vanilla swirl” metaphor, used to describe the child of an interracial relationship, breaks the song’s serious tone and recalls the poorly aged language of songs like “Brother Louie” and “Island Girl.”
Elsewhere, Flowers’ assumptions of other perspectives can be deeply evocative and serve their subjects with care. On “Miss America,” he sings from the perspective of a woman penning a letter to the drug‑addicted father of her children. The solemn guitar piece is tinged with soft harmonica and carries the same ache of a Johnny Cash number, only stretched across Flowers’ vocal bravado. What reads like the cathartic recall of a tired woman opens into larger questions about living with pain, especially when he sings, “If Jesus really suffered and paid for all this sin, why do we still feel it again and again?” The lyric is particularly striking given Flowers’ Mormon background, lending immense depth to the song’s spiritual exhaustion.
When he steps out of character, Flowers is perfectly endearing, wearing his heart on his sleeve. “On Our Own” is one of the most direct and literal songs of his career, a warm tribute to his brother‑in‑law that shows how affecting he can still be when he writes about his own life. THRASHER may be a bit all over the place, but when it’s good, it truly shines and shows listeners that their choice to spend time with Flowers was a decision well made.
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