Next month, global rockstars The Killers will drop their seventh studio album, titled 'Pressure Machine', just under a year since their last record 'Imploding The Mirage' was released.
With no opportunity to promote 'Imploding The Mirage' the traditional way for a stadium rock band like The Killers thanks to COVID, the seeds of 'Pressure Machine' were first sowed during the global shutdown last year."Everything came to this grinding halt," frontman Brandon Flowers says, "and it was the first time in a long time for me that I was faced with silence.
"And out of that silence this record began to bloom, full of songs that would have otherwise been too quiet and drowned out by the noise of typical Killers records."
The coronavirus forced the band into their first major stoppage as a unit since 2004, and Flowers retreated to his home town of Nephi, Utah – a quaint, out of the way community of just over 5,000 souls, a rubber plant, plenty of wheat fields and no traffic lights.
The return to everyday realities fostered and harnessed the creative drive of Flowers, who began mining old memories from his time living in Nephi as a teenager.
"We were discussing [Brandon] moving to Nephi as a kid and being stuck in the middle of nowhere," the band's drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr says, "and during COVID-19, it started to feel like we were all in the middle of nowhere."
Concurs Flowers: "I discovered this grief that I hadn't dealt with," he says, "many memories of my time in Nephi are tender.
"But the ones tied to fear or great sadness were emotionally charged. I've got more understanding now than when we started the band, and hopefully I was able to do justice to these stories and these lives in this little town that I grew up in."
The result is 'Pressure Machine', a collection of songs that question the unbending pressure of the American dream compounded by religious disenchantment. Yet they also touch on the healing arrival of summer, the first crop of hay, sweeter skies as well as darker, realistic themes like the opioid epidemic and local tragedies.
With 'Pressure Machine' set for release 13 August (pre-order it), this weekend The Killers headline Splendour XR. They have also hinted that details will arrive soon for a 2022 Australian tour. Standby for that announce.
