The Killers’ new album, Imploding the Mirage, provides a perfect soundtrack to the current urban exodus. For most listeners, the Killers are a blast from the past, defined by their 2004 megahit “Mr. Brightside.” Since then, they’ve been chasing a very particular vision, largely outside of public consciousness. It’s taken some time — 16 years — but on the new album, everything finally clicks. With songs about throwing caution to the wind and leaving town, the album is strangely relevant. Moreover, it represents a course correction from the depressing musical trends of the past decade and points beyond itself to a possible cultural revival of the heartland.
Imploding the Mirage is an incredibly earnest album filled with Americana anthem rock that evokes deserts and Western imagery. The “mirage” of the title refers to the false dreams of pop culture, and the band’s aging rock stars continually affirm simple joys in contrast to illusions. This earnestness risks being corny, and the album at times teeters on the edge of an eye roll, but its few mawkish missteps only reinforce the impressiveness of its balancing act. The Killers don’t feel derivative when they conjure a pantheon of past rockers because Brandon Flowers is such a first-rate frontman that he imbues every song with authentic emotional intensity. “Dying Breed” is the standout track that does Springsteen better than Springsteen, while “Blowback” is an almost-country song that sounds like driving in the desert with Tom Petty. It’s also a deeply religious album: “When the Dreams Run Dry” is Christian eschatology with synths and a dash of yacht rock, and “Fire in the Bone,” though almost too indebted to the Talking Heads, is redeemed by its unique Book of Psalms-inspired lyrics.
The Killers risk schmaltz to deliver genuine love anthems at a time when popular music has forgotten them. It’s instructive to compare Imploding the Mirage to 2017’s American Dream by LCD Soundsystem, another album by middle-aged rockers about chasing false dreams. LCD Soundsystem, the last of the hipsters, made songs about depressed hedonists having anxiety attacks about growing old. The Killers have sing-along choruses about growing old with a loved one.
The new Killers album is an antidote to the bleak music trends of the 2010s. In the past decade, hip-hop became despondent. The high-energy macabre of artists such as Earl Sweatshirt quickly devolved into drugged-out despair; Mac Miller made albums about wallowing in addiction and then died of a drug overdose. On Soundcloud, niche artists with names like SuicideBoys released albums with titles like Kill Yourself. Radio megahits moaned about death and Xanax. This was the soundtrack to the opioid crisis: an inarticulate and monotonous downer. Pop music became the reverse side of the same coin: mechanistic and repetitive songs about sex. In two different “steamy” songs, Rihanna’s “Work” and Fifth Harmony’s “Work From Home,” the chorus was just the word “work” repeated over and over. Ostensibly club hits, these songs reflect the trends of the workplace. Meanwhile, the simple love song, like the romantic comedy, almost completely disappeared. That’s freakish.
Pop culture is oppressively ugly. Conspiracy theories spread online because people need a way of explaining this ugliness without turning on democracy itself. These theories are an expression of disbelief that we the people could actually enjoy this crap. Behind the scenes, they suggest, there must be a Lovecraftian death cult churning out ugly pop culture in the service of some eldritch horror. We are trapped by ugliness, and the result is paranoia and claustrophobia.
In response to this, it’s best to just go. Don’t think too much — just pack the car, and get the hell out of town. Blast across the continent until you find those places where the sky is big, the stars are bright, and beauty is a self-evident reality. This is the energy that the Killers summon. And they’re not the only ones.
American artists have always drawn inspiration from the natural beauty of our country, and prior to COVID-19, there were already rumblings of people leaving the cities. In the past few years, it was common to hear about New Yorkers leaving for places like Denver or even Omaha. The internet is now the locus of culture, which may mean that artists, untethered from cities, will flock to places that offer physical beauty. Too much has been said about Kanye West, but it’s still interesting to note that the man who has been ahead of almost every trend recently moved to Wyoming. His music videos now show wide-open vistas. The synth-pop band Future Islands wrote one of the best songs of the past decade, “Seasons (Waiting on You),” and the accompanying music video showed the physical beauty of the heartland. The Grammy award-winning band the War on Drugs had music videos about rural communities helping each other out. Music videos sell desire. Imploding the Mirage shouts what was being whispered.
The Killers’ new album might not produce a hit to rival the success of “Mr. Brightside.” It might even get lost in the content churn. But the band has captured something essential about this moment. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that the only path to becoming a writer is to have something to say that is felt so intensely that the form and the emotion mix as if conceived together. This deeply romantic notion might also be reversed. Intense focus on a specific form, like the anthem rock song, will produce exactly what needs to be said. There’s something about Imploding the Mirage that feels almost inevitable. Of course the answer to drugged-out despair is to embrace the simple joys of a normal life, of course the answer to repetitive sex songs is to contrast them with the beauty of love growing old, and of course we would need to be reminded of all this by aging Christian cowboys. It’s so quintessentially American.
James McElroy is a novelist and essayist based in New York.
