Brandon Flowers' Thrasher: Nashville Country Reinvention
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- Brandon Flowers released Thrasher, his third solo album, recorded in Nashville as a full-throated country record featuring pedal steel legend Bruce Bouton, 85-year-old harmonica player Charlie McCoy, Dave Rawlings, and Margo Price.
- Flowers wrote more than 30 songs for Thrasher, and the reviewer argues the album's weird, specific lyrical imagery—'peach-fuzz boys getting hard in the corner on Mortal Kombat,' 'Elvis in a Tesla Model X'—makes it a far stronger record than the Killers' 2021 Pressure Machine.
- The reviewer criticizes Miss America, a song about a young woman in an abusive relationship, as clumsily written despite being a recurring theme for Flowers.
- Angel, a song about a Black baseball player who abandons his family and becomes a drug smuggler, is called a particularly bad foot-in-mouth moment—the reviewer writes it could be read as either a critique of American racial hegemony or as flat-out racist, and that ambiguity is itself damning.
- The review frames Thrasher as a stylistic follow-up to Pressure Machine's windswept balladry but argues Flowers 'wilts when he doesn't fully commit,' making this full-commitment country album a far more enjoyable listen.
- Compared to Flowers' 2015 solo record The Desired Effect, Thrasher lacks attention-grabbing singles but is 'front-to-back a far stronger, more enjoyable album' that could win back fans who haven't tuned in since Mr Brightside.
Why it matters: Flowers' commercial calculation matters: by going full honky-tonk with Nashville's top session players, he stakes a claim as a credible country-outsider artist, but the album's two racially and thematically fraught tracks expose how thin his songwriting becomes when he reaches beyond his wheelhouse for big social statements.
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