Cover Feature The Killers: ‘This Is Us Being Us’

There are thousands of bodies stretching out to meet the horizon, blending into the dark night. Maybe there are stars above your head, maybe a cool wind whips at your face. It’s breathtaking, it’s awe-inspiring, and above all, it’s completely surreal. The congregation that resides in front of you, they echo your words with true belief. There’s euphoria in the air and you’re stood amidst it all. You are the leader of this sea of people and your music, your melodies, your lyrics, unite them all.

Now, we can’t be entirely resolute in our imagery but that’s - sort of, at least - how we like to imagine life in The Killers to be.

After all, they are a band that require no real introduction. Having released their debut album ‘Hot Fuss’ less than a decade ago, the Las Vegas quintet were catapulted to the top of their game. By the time second album, ‘Sam’s Town’, was unleashed they were selling out arenas in minutes, and headlining festivals all around the world. In fact, every one of their albums released thus far has found a home at the top of the UK charts. And whether your song of choice was ‘Mr Brightside’, ‘When You Were Young’ or ‘Human’, we all know that their melodies are etched into your brain.

For a while though, it seemed as though the curtain may have fallen on the band for the final time. Following the release of third studio album ‘Day & Age’, the heavy touring schedule took its inevitable toll and the band ground to a halt as 2009 drew to a close. One hundred and thirty seven shows says that’s no mean feat, but the run, which saw them visit six continents, had finally tired them out, leaving the four-piece missing their families and feeling the burn. With the dawning of 2010, the door seemed to be closed upon them for the foreseeable future.

Granted, the four-piece didn’t entirely go quietly. In fact, only one member went without the release of a solo album during the band’s hiatus; vocalist Brandon Flowers unveiled ‘Flamingo’ in late 2010, Ronnie Vannucci Jr. released Big Talk’s self-titled effort in June 2011, whilst Mark Stoermer’s ‘Another Life’ dropped later that same year. Then, before you knew it, they were all in a studio together, and The Killers were back in the game. Sort of.

“I think the first couple practices,” begins guitarist Dave Keuning, as we sit in the café of a North London photo studio, asking how it was to join each other in the studio again, “for whatever reason, it didn’t seem like we created as much magic. But I don’t know… that might’ve just been bad luck, I dunno. Then, we got some ideas. Once there’s one idea forming, it usually creates other ideas from there. We had some days that were more productive than others, which is normal, I guess.”
“We’re not complacent,” interjects their frontman Flowers, who plots his words with a deliberate thoughtfulness. “That’s one of the reasons that it was so difficult. We’re all so… we gotta really take a look at what we’re doing and ask the hard questions: ‘Is it good enough? Is it ready?’ We worked hard on this record. Every time you put a record out, a few months later there are regrets, and this is the closest - I think - that we’ve come to hopefully not having any.” He laughs, self-assuringly.

It seems then, that their fourth release ‘Battle Born’ was a difficult birth, and when you begin to discover the logistics, that’s not all that surprising. Not only did the writing and recording process see the band reconvene in their own Battle Born Studios for the first time since their hiatus, with the work taking the best part of a year (“It took a long time, from start to finish,” says Keuning) but the group were unable to lock down one producer for a long enough period to visit Las Vegas and head up the whole project. So, instead of waiting around for one big name, they employed the help of five: Stuart Price, Steve Lillywhite, Damian Taylor, Brendan O’Brien and Daniel Lanois.

“It was a complicated thing with the producers. It wasn’t very organised!” explains the guitarist. “They were never there all at the same time. It was more like, this guy could work this month, this guy could work this week. Every once in a while, Damian Taylor and Steve Price would work together but usually, it was just one of them. Occasionally, it was just us working on something.” Was that not a daunting task in itself? “You’ve got to be fearless. I learned that from Stuart Price,” say Flowers of the man who worked alongside him on his debut solo release. “He’s so fast, and we did some of our best work in a matter of hours with Stuart. So, really, a week with someone nowadays can be a lot of time. What’s capable of being accomplished is amazing.”



However, not everything made for such quick work, a factor no doubt reflected by the full recording period. A constantly fluctuating tracklisting meant that some songs which simply didn’t exist at first, were rewritten, re-recorded and re-entered into the mixing pot on numerous occasions; something perfectly demonstrated by the band’s glorious lead single ‘Runaways’: “That’s been kicking around a long time,” explains Flowers. “That was when we were touring for ‘Day & Age’. There are things that take reworking and you know, beating them to the ground, digging them back up and only then are they finished.”

Obviously though, for an album with so many producers, would it ever be the case that too many cooks spoil the broth? With such influential men at work, did it ever cross the band’s mind that maybe each name would leave too much of their own mark and mean that the record, in turn, lost a little of its own Killers essence? “I think we can tell a little bit…” Keuning sounds a little uncertain. “We know how the producer influenced a certain song. Dan Lanois had a style and Stuart Price had a certain style and Brendan O’Brien has his own, but within that, we always were the ones that would have the song ideas.”
Flowers is a little more sure about the band’s strength: “You can stick us in a room with whoever you want and it sounds like The Killers. It’s a testament to us, I think. Our identity is strong.”

Undoubtedly too, ‘Battle Born’ is the album that demonstrates that most. With their debut ‘Hot Fuss’ being dubbed too ‘anglophilic’, ‘Sam’s Town’ being too ‘Americana’ and ‘Day & Age’ simply declared too ‘pop’ by the press, it’s through their fourth effort that it feels as though the four of them have finally found their stride. “There’s always been some road, or some new twist or turn, that we’ve gone down,” says Flowers, “and we just thought it was time to take a deep breath and figure out what we’re best at. With each record, it was what road we were going down and the focus of the media and all of this stuff…” he pauses. “This is us being us. I was pushing myself lyrically more than I ever have. I really wanted it to just be fully realised. Before, we had deadlines and I ended up fudging a couple of things, and then I’ve gotta sing it every night… This record is very different in that respect. These stories are fully realised. Every song is.”
“I just tell people,” says Keuning, “it’s got a little bit of all the albums - ‘Hot Fuss’, ‘Sam’s Town’, ‘Day & Age’ - because that’s who we are. We never completely got away from those albums because they’re so within us. I think that’s natural. That’s what you’d expect it to be: a little bit of all three of those albums, plus a little bit of a new, modern Killers sound.”

“It helped that we made a point to not have a deadline at first,” he adds, when we ask if the sheer amount of time they had allowed for more freedom to define themselves fully, before Flowers agrees: “We definitely had more time to live with it and get our fingerprints on it.”
“We were right, kinda overlapping it,” adds the guitarist. “We squeezed it just at the last second and a couple more songs made the record because of that.”
Undeniably though, all that freedom could equate to not ever feeling fully satisfied with the end product. “That’s the danger of having your own studio and having the freedom that we have,” starts Flowers, before smiling, “but it’s all working out. We’re alright.”

And on hearing their fourth full-length, you’d no doubt agree. With soaring choruses and picturesque vignettes of Las Vegas life, this is an album that marks the return of one of the world’s biggest contemporary bands, and simultaneously pulls no punches in encapsulating just what made The Killers so great the first, second and third time around. A seemingly perfect blend of their previous works, that still pangs with the same nostalgia-laden melodies that grabbed you way back when, their new songs already feel like they’ll glide easily in amongst their back-catalogue. Truthfully, it’d only be fair to say this feels less like battle born; more battle won.

The Killers’ new album ‘Battle Born’ is out now via Mercury.

Taken from the October 2012 issue of DIY, available now. For more details click here.