If you were looking for a measure of quite how successful The Killers have been in the UK, how completely we’ve taken the Las Vegas outfit to our hearts, then the fact that Mr Brightside, their defining, signature hit, recently passed 280 weeks in the UK top 100 is it. By that metric, it is the most successful song ever released here, and it’s not even close – Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol, itself a chart behemoth, is it’s nearest rival with a paltry (by comparison) 166 weeks in the top 100.

Of course, so complete is our nation’s love for The Killers that such a benchmark isn’t actually needed anyway. Tune in to any UK summer festival coverage over the last few years (pandemic aside), and chances are you would have seen fields packed with tens of thousands of your sweaty countrymen and women, belting back every single lyric at Brandon Flowers and co., as they adorned the stage like the throne it is to their special status in our hearts. 

Curiously though, The Killers new and seventh studio album, and their second in a year after last year’s glorious Imploding The Mirage, is their most un-British to date. Instead, Pressure Machine is a mostly low key, eleven-track concept album exploring, through a variety of characters, some presumably real and others imagined, small town America, based on Flowers’ own childhood in Utah.

Interspersed with monologues that shadow the songs themes of escape, unemployment, addiction and despair, the overall feeling here is one of The Killers doing Bruce Springsteen. Remarkably, it works.

Quiet Town lays on the Nebraska-esque harmonica, Terrible Thing is a brooding whisper of a song, while Runaway Horses is all delicate acoustic guitars and In The Car Outside raises the tempo. 

The band have managed to cram an inordinate amount into Pressure Machine, and it’s a true feat of songwriting, weaving as it does remarkable stories across it’s rich and varied soundscape. In many ways, it feels like the successor to their second album Sam’s Town, only older and wiser. Whatever you make of it, it shows that The Killers aren’t ready to retire yet.

Pressure Machine tracklist:

1. West Hills
2. Quiet Town
3. Terrible Thing
4. Cody
5. Sleepwalker
6. Runaway Horses
7. In The Car Outside
8. In Another Life
9. Desperate Things
10. Pressure Machine
11. The Getting By

Watch the official video for Quiet Town here.

Author: Joe Sharratt

Joe Sharratt is a writer and journalist based in the UK covering music, literature, sport, and travel.