The Killers

Inspiration has never eluded Las Vegas' The Killers, and it's a damn good thing it hasn't, because their newest record, their third studio album entitled Day & Age is full of their finest songs to date.

Formed in Las Vegas in 2002, the band belongs to the lineage of high-energy rock bands that manage to be both commercially successful and critically acclaimed (both of their studio albums have received endless column inches bursting with praise), and it's almost mind-blowing to consider that without the classifieds section of a local paper, they might have never been.

Flowers first met guitarist Keuning while perusing said classifieds for fellow musicians; when Dave's ad mentioned The Beatles, Oasis and more, Flowers knew he was on the right track. They claimed the name The Killers (taken from the bass drum of a fictional band in a New Order video), and eventually recruited Stoermer and Vannucci into the fold, all of them agreeing that there seemed to be an intangible something to the music they were making, as well as the response they were generating from people who saw them play.

Their debut, Hot Fuss, catapulted them onto the global stage upon its 2004 release, selling millions of copies around the world. The band toured for two years straight, playing more than four-hundred shows, and eventually returned to Vegas to begin to work on the follow-up album. The result is a love letter of sorts to their hometown entitled Sam's Town, which was released in 2006 and spent forty-two weeks on the Billboard Top 200.

The signature first single off Day & Age is the synth-heavy "Human," four minutes of sweeping, epic rock. But The Killers also experiment with different instruments here. "I Can't Stay" has a tropical sound and, as the Flowers says, "could be the most perfect pop song we've ever written." "Losing Touch," meanwhile, is a gorgeous uptempo track with bright horns and grim lyrics that lend it an ominous vibe. "Spaceman," an unabashedly arena-sized glam-rock number whose associative lyrics reference, among other themes, alien abduction. More than anything, The Killers are excited for their fans to hear what they've been creating, though, says Stoermer, "We're always a little nervous about whether people are going to like it."

The people have in the past, and they will, yet again.

To find out more about The Killers, check out their official site at www.thekillersmusic.com