Brandon Flowers Made a Full Country Album in Nashville, and the Session Roster Says He Means It

Brandon Flowers is making a country record. Not a Killers detour into Americana, not a song or two with a fiddle buried in the mix. A full country/western album, recorded in Nashville with Nashville players, called Thrasher, out August 21 on Island. The lead single "Plans" arrives Friday, June 26. It is his first solo album in over a decade.

If you have followed Flowers at all, the surprise here is smaller than the headline makes it sound. He grew up Mormon in Nevada and Nephi, Utah, and he has been wearing cowboy hats in public since the Bush administration. The last Killers album, 2021's Pressure Machine, was already a quiet, small-town song cycle pitched somewhere near Springsteen's Nebraska. Then in 2023 he said he had scrapped a half-finished Killers record. Thrasher is what he found on the other side of that decision.

What he actually did

Flowers cut the album at RCA Studio A in Nashville last July, the same room where Dolly Parton and Waylon Jennings made records. He brought in two producers who pull in different directions: Shawn Everett, who has worked with Kacey Musgraves and has a habit of making roots music sound strange and enormous, and Jonathan Rado of Foxygen, who specializes in warm, vintage-leaning rock. That pairing is the most interesting thing on paper. Everett can make a pedal steel sound like a weather system. Rado keeps things human and a little loose. If the record works, it probably works in the space between them.

The session musicians are the tell that he meant it. David Rawlings, Gillian Welch's longtime partner and one of the best guitarists in American roots music, plays on it. So does Charlie McCoy, the 85-year-old harmonica player whose credits run from Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde to Elvis. You do not call those two for a costume. You call them because you want the real thing in the room.

Flowers framed the move himself in the album's trailer:

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 that I have to tell at the moment, with a breezy enthusiasm.

The press materials say the record draws on his childhood in Nephi. "My father's music" is the line that matters. This is being sold as a homecoming, not a rebrand.

The tracklist

Ten songs. "Miss America" and "An American Dream" suggest he has not lost his taste for the big, flag-sized title, which has been a Flowers signature going back to Sam's Town.

The honest caveat

Nobody outside the camp has heard the album yet. "Plans" is the first piece of it to surface, and it lands Friday. The one clip floating around, a few seconds from the trailer, reportedly sounds like a Killers song with pedal steel added on top, which is either the best or the worst news depending on how much you wanted an actual genre departure. A producer pairing this deliberate and a session roster this serious usually means the artist is chasing something specific, not splitting the difference. We will know on Friday whether the singing matches the studio.

For now, the facts: first Flowers solo album since 2015's The Desired Effect, his first since Flamingo in 2010 before that, made with country's heaviest hitters, out August 21. He also announced a 2026 tour alongside it. An artist presale began June 25, with general onsale June 26.

The bar for a rock frontman going country is low and the floor is littered with vanity projects. Flowers has the advantage of actually being from out there. Now he has to sing like it.