Brandon Flowers debuted new solo material and joined Lucy Dacus and Nathaniel Rateliff at Newport Folk Festival – watch footage below.
The Killers frontman played his own set at the Rhode Island festival on Sunday (July 26), where he gave three songs from his upcoming third solo album ‘Thrasher’ their live debuts.
He opened with ‘Crossfire’, from his 2010 debut album ‘Flamingo’, before performing recent singles ‘Paradise’ and ‘Plans’ live for the first time.
Flowers later debuted the previously unheard ‘Tiger’s Blood’, while also revisiting ‘The Desired Effect’ tracks ‘Still Want You’ and ‘Diggin’ Up The Heart’ for the first time since 2016.
The set included stripped-back renditions of Killers classics ‘Read My Mind’ and ‘When You Were Young’, as well as ‘The Getting By’ from the band’s 2021 album ‘Pressure Machine’.
Dawes’ Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith also joined Flowers for the band’s ‘When My Time Comes’, with the frontman introducing them as “the best harmonists and singers I know”.
Watch footage from the performance below.
A moment for this clip of @BrandonFlowers performing “Plans” live from @Newportfolkfest pic.twitter.com/TX1qkQ1d2G
— Island Records (@IslandRecords) July 29, 2026
Flowers’ full Newport Folk Festival setlist was:
‘Crossfire’
‘Paradise’
‘Still Want You’
‘Diggin’ Up The Heart’
‘Plans’
‘When My Time Comes’ (Dawes cover)
‘The Getting By’
‘Read My Mind’
‘Tiger’s Blood’
‘When You Were Young’
‘The Road Goes On Forever’ (Robert Earl Keen)
‘The Clock Was Tickin’’
Flowers had already made a surprise appearance at the festival on Friday (July 24), joining Lucy Dacus during her set for a stripped-back cover of Jim Croce’s 1972 song ‘Time In A Bottle’.
Introducing him as “Mr. Killers himself”, Dacus welcomed Flowers to the stage for the song, which she recorded for the expanded edition of her fourth album ‘Forever Is A Feeling’.
Following the performance, she told the crowd: “Y’all are going to have to pinch me.”
Flowers returned during Nathaniel Rateliff’s star-studded closing set on Sunday, joining him for a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Atlantic City’, as well as renditions of John Prine’s ‘Paradise’ and The Band’s ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’.
‘Thrasher’ will be released on August 21 via Island Records, marking Flowers’ first solo album since 2015’s ‘The Desired Effect’. The Nashville-recorded project draws on his childhood in Nephi, Utah, and the country music his father played during drives through the surrounding countryside.
“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,” Flowers said when announcing the record.
Flowers will support the album with a tour of North America, the UK and Ireland later this year, including a show at London’s Royal Albert Hall in October. Find any remaining tickets here.
He has also said that a second completed solo album will follow ‘Thrasher’. Flowers previously described the two projects as contrasting “South West records”, with one taking a romantic approach and the other continuing the narrative songwriting heard on ‘Pressure Machine’.
As for The Killers, Flowers has predicted that the band’s eighth studio album will arrive in 2027.
“My best guess is that in 2027 you will get the best Killers record,” he said earlier this year.
Flowers previously told NME that the record would feature all four members of the group and would not return to the synth-driven sound of standalone singles ‘Boy’ and ‘Your Side Of Town’.
“We will not put it out unless it is the best,” he said. “We’ve already discussed it. It’s gotta be so good or it’s not worth it.”
