Brandon Flowers is to make a pivot into country music with his first solo album in over a decade.
On Tuesday, The Killers frontman announced that he will drop his latest project, Thrasher, via Island Records on 21 August.
Recorded in Nashville, Tennessee with his longtime producers Shawn Everett and Jonathan Rado, Utah-raised Flowers drew upon Americana and Western traditions while working on his new music.
“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,” he shared, noting that his dad often used to listen to the likes of Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.
Plans, the first single, will be available on Friday.
The 10-track album also features One Of Us, which is a tribute to his late brother-in-law, while Miss America reflects on ’80s shopping mall pageants and “fraught early childhood memories”.
“In the end, Thrasher is a heartfelt and adventurous document of all the people Flowers has known and loved and feared, but also a portrait of a man making peace with himself and the places, sights, and sounds that made him,” a press release reads. “Much of Thrasher features songs written in persona thinly veiling stories about Flowers’s friends and family from his teenage years until now, all rendered with the balance of sadness and humour inherent to country music.”
Flowers is next set to perform at the Austin City Limits Music Festival in October.
The 45-year-old released his second solo studio album, The Desired Effect, in 2015, while The Killers’ seventh studio album, Pressure Machine, dropped in 2021.
