The Killers have mixed feelings about their 2017 album Wonderful Wonderful. For example, Brandon Flowers recently said of lead single “The Man,” “We experimented a little bit on the last album. We’re proud of ‘The Man’ and all that it did, but the heart wasn’t quite there.” Flowers seems much more fond of the band’s new album, Imploding The Mirage, and he thanks Vampire Weekend for that.
In a recent NME interview, Flowers said Vampire Weekend’s 2019 album Father Of The Bride made him and the band want to be better: “That really helped to propel us into the right direction and realize that we couldn’t just phone in The Killers’ record. We had to do better. I told Ezra [Koenig] that. I’m grateful for people like him.”
He was then asked if the album started a healthy competition with Vampire Weekend, and Flowers responded, “Yeah! It reminded me of how I felt when The Strokes’ Is This It came out.”
Elsewhere in the chat, Flowers said his move to Utah, where he spent many of his formative years, was also an important creative inspiration:
“I wasn’t getting disenchanted with music, but it was becoming my job and something that I just did. I hadn’t forgotten, but I did need to be reminded of the power that it used to hold over me. It was magic, y’know? When I first turned to music, I was living in a place called Nephi that was almost like being quarantined. It was 2,000 people, no stop lights — a rural country town. Some music almost made it possible for me to dream. It turned this black and white town into color. Just being here, having these mountains around me and the seasons, and hearing a lot of that music again, paired with the smells and sights of Utah, was kind of an awakening for me. It reminded me of being 13 or 14 and wondering what a service it did for me.”
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