Conservatives are praising The Killers frontman Brandon Flowers and his new album, “Thrasher,” which leans into country western elements and religion.
Flowers is best known as the lead singer of The Killers, who achieved global fame in the mid-2000s following the release of their multi-platinum debut album, “Hot Fuss,” which featured hits like “Mr. Brightside.” Flowers, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has drawn cultural attention with an album centered on Americana, family, and a spiritual yearning for God amid a troubled world.
“Two things can be true at the same time. The fact that I love new wave and rock and roll has been well documented. But a life is long enough to allow for more. Walt Whitman said it best, ‘I am large. I contain multitudes,’” Flowers said in a trailer for the album. The promotional footage features him driving a classic convertible on a desert highway interspersed with shots of truck stops, diners, ranches, and American flags.
“Well, I’m larger now than I was 20 years ago,” he continued. “And I’ve unlocked a room that feels like it’s been waiting for me all along. Country-western music, my father’s music. It has offered itself to me and the stories I have to tell at the moment with a breezy enthusiasm.”
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He noted that this album was recorded in Nashville, Tennessee, clarifying that he is not running away from rock music or his old songs, but rather, “found room for more.”
The album’s focal track, “An American Dream,” gained traction following a viral broadcast performance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” The song explores Americana and the illusion of fame as a form of fool’s gold, juxtaposed with the value of family and salvation.
In the lyrics, Flowers sings about being on the open road while yearning for home, feeling a deep nostalgia for a bygone era, and encountering a roadside billboard that asks, “Where would I spend my eternity?”
He later described being picked up by Elvis Presley — as he looked in his 1968 comeback tour — driving a Tesla model X and sober. Elvis laughs when asked if fame was worth it, but cries when mentioning his daughter, eventually handing over the keys and saying, “Put it on Jesus.”
The recurring chorus then finishes off the song, “Gold and silver, God and glitter. Lights that flicker on hubcap chrome. On the road to Heaven. In Strauss and Stetson. Swimming pools of horsepower. Take me back home.”
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The release arrives amid a broader, well-documented resurgence of country-western culture, spearheaded by stars like Ella Langley topping the charts.
National Review contributing editor Daniel Foster talked about the song as one built on a rough American nostalgia.
“The tune itself is great. A hook precision-engineered for bar sing-alongs and a lyric full of James Ellroy, Cormac McCarthy-level American arcana and myth (‘Strauss and Stetson,’ ‘an ad for the Red Man,’ and Elvis Presley in ‘jet-black ’68 comeback leather’),” he wrote. “It’s also fully, unapologetically a song about God — a distinctively American, distinctively American West God, which makes sense since Flowers’s God is Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints.”
CCM Magazine, a Christian music news outlet, also wrote an extensive review of the album. While he is of a different Christian denomination, Logan Sekulow of CCM Magazine credited Flowers for his frequent references to biblical concepts and images.
“[M]arketed ‘Christian’ artists should take note, that Thrasher and the catalogue of Flowers/The Killers contain more direct references to Christ, heaven and biblical principles than you will find on many releases marketed specifically to Christian audiences outside of Worship music,” he wrote. “This is the same songwriter who warned about a devil who doesn’t resemble Jesus in ‘When You Were Young,’ celebrated the sustaining power and rarity of a loving marriage in ‘Dying Breed’, and retold the emotional arc of the prodigal son in ‘Fire in Bone.’ Flowers has never treated faith like a decorative accessory. It is part of the architecture of his songwriting.”
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He specifically praised the use of Elvis as a figure tied to worldly fame and yet yearning for God.
“The King becomes something closer to a spiritual predecessor: another larger-than-life performer raised in church, caught between the sacred and the spectacular, now passing something down to the artist who followed him,” Sekulow wrote.
He then concluded, “The record reaches its destination in a great collision of ‘Gold and Silver, God and Glitter.’ That phrase could almost serve as a mission statement for Brandon Flowers’ Thrasher. Faith and fame, eternity and entertainment, heaven and hell, Las Vegas and Utah. It all finally makes sense when Elvis is there to throw him the keys as he offers one final word to his protégé: ‘put it on Jesus.’”
Fox News Digital spoke to conservative culture critic Christian Toto, who called Flowers’ performance of the song on “The Tonight Show,” “Remarkable. Real. Raw. Passionate. Spiritual. Mesmerizing. Here’s a veteran singer who seems to have a new lease on life.”
He also offered a suggestion as to why country music appears to be having a revival in recent years.
“It’s more stripped down than other music genres. We have some mighty talents at work at the moment, singers who connect with large, energetic groups of Americans. Morgan Wallen rushes to mind, a singer so popular he survived one of the nastiest, and most unfair, Cancel Culture attacks and only grew bigger,” he said. “It’s a genre that allows for God, for love, for spirituality, and for a hunger to touch dirty, get dirty and get back up again. With A.I. looming, and smart phones keeping us digitized, there’s a greater need for something soulful and true.”
