The Killers are ready remind you they are still at the top of the alternative music mountain with a new album ‘Wonderful Wonderful’ which is due out later this year, a headlining set at Lollapalooza in August, and a fresh flashy single ‘THE MAN’ which you can hear here. Speaking of being a ‘man’, Brendon Flowers and company touched on the idea of manliness and the lyrical points of their new albums which sees them add old elements with funkier new ones in an interview with Entertainment Weekly recently.
Here is an excerpt from the interview:
Lyrically, the new songs grapple with what it means to be a man. “In your head it’s about being tough and bringing home the bacon, but what I’ve come to find is it’s really more about empathy and compassion,” says Flowers, now 36. So on the pulse-spiking “Tyson vs. Douglas,” named for the 1990 boxing match that saw then-champion Mike Tyson lose to Buster Douglas in a shocking upset, Flowers explores what it’s like to watch a hero fall. As the father of three boys, it’s a subject that hits close to home. “Right now,” he says, “to a 9-year-old, a 7-year-old, and a 6-year-old at home, I’m Mike Tyson — and I don’t want to go down.”
They found a guide in producer Jacknife Lee (U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, Taylor Swift’s Red), who worked with them in studios in Vegas and Los Angeles. “We have a lot of similar influences, but he’s also really aware of what’s happening now,” Flowers says. “He’s constantly buying records and applying things to our music that we haven’t done before.” The disco-tinged lead single, “The Man” (out now), was originally written around a Kool & the Gang sample that the band later re-created using old-school techniques. For the dramatic, slow-burning title track, Lee recorded Vannucci drumming along to old hip-hop and funk records with a boom box, then spliced those tracks into the song’s rhythm section. “There was a lot of experimentation,” Vannucci says.
