Album Review: Wonderful Wonderful, The Killers

Does Brandon Flowers still have the Killer instinct? The Las Vegas glam-popsters’ fifth album arrives in fraught circumstances, with guitarist Dave Keuning and bassist Mark Stoermer opting out of an upcoming arena tour and frontman Flowers opening up in interviews to a confidence-shaking bout of writer’s bloc.

Such uncertainties have seeped into the marrow of Wonderful Wonderful (the title of course ironic). In addition to wrestling with stuttering creativity, the mercurial Flowers was required to cut short the 2015 tour promoting his second solo album, The Desired Effect, when his wife was diagnosed with depression and PTSD.

These domestic travails loom darkly – with Flowers struggling to reconcile his pop deity image with his responsibilities as husband and father. The theme is ruminated upon in bittersweet fashion on single ‘The Man’, a gaudy stomper with a fetid heart and lyrics that sarcastically trumpet the machismo Flowers was brought up to believe in (“I got gas in the tank, I got money in the bank / I got news for you, baby, you’re lookin’ at the man.”)

Through his career as pop star Flowers has seldom left his guard down, a decade-plus of Killers records giving us at best a fuzzy idea of the man behind the persona. But that changes here, with the now 36-year-old referencing his writer’s bloc and the panicked email he sent his pal Bono on ‘Have All The Songs Been Written?’ .

He employs a boxing metaphor, meanwhile, on ‘Tyson V Douglas’, as he worries about failing in the eyes of his children (just as Tyson was surprisingly KO-ed by Buster Douglas in their 1990 title bout).

Throughout, the high-octane glam-pop is solidly catchy. But the cocksureness of old has given way to an unsettling determination to keep going no matter what. “Are we human?” Flowers once asked. Wonderful Wonderful belatedly answers the question with its portrait of a very mortal rock god trying to keep a grip on his stardom even as the ground beneath his feet rumbles and splinters.

7/10

Out now