Brandon Flowers discusses Russia incident, says he’s scrapped new Killers album

The Killers frontman Brandon Flowers says he has scrapped the band’s new album halfway through.

The band returned this week with new single ‘Your Side Of Town’, which marked the band’s first single of the year, as well as their first release since last year’s standalone single ‘Boy’.

However, in a new interview with The Times, Flowers has revealed that the band’s planned new album has been scrapped.

“Halfway through recording I realised, ‘I can’t do this,’” Flowers said, adding: “This isn’t the kind of record… I think this will be the… I don’t think you’ll see us making this type of music any more.”

He added: “This is the crisis I’m in. The Killers are my identity and our songs fill the seats, but I’m more fulfilled making music like [2021 album] ‘Pressure Machine’.

“I found a side of myself writing it that was strong. This was the guy I’d been looking for! I’m as proud of ‘Hot Fuss’ as you can be for something you did when you were 20, but I’m not 20. So I’m thinking about the next phase of my life.”

Of the band’s future, he went on: “I’m a different person now, it’ll be difficult to go back,” adding that he wants to make quieter music for smaller venues.

“It is a conflict,” he added. “It is just, well, at what point do I make that change? Who in the band wants to do that too? No matter what, there will always be people who look at me and just think of Somebody Told Me. And I get that. But I’m interested in evolving.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Flowers discussed a recent incident at a show in Georgia, where the band were booed by the crowd by inviting a Russian fan onstage.

Introducing the fan, frontman Brandon Flowers told the crowd: “We don’t know the etiquette of this land but this guy’s a Russian. You OK with a Russian coming up here?” before he was greeted with boos from the audience.

“I had to calm an impossible situation,” he told The Times. “We want our concerts to be communal and I had no idea words I was taught my entire life to represent a unity of the human family could be taken as being pro-Russian occupation. We’re sad how this played out.”

After the show, The Killers wrote in a statement: “Good people of Georgia, it was never our intention to offend anyone! We have a longstanding tradition of inviting people to play drums and it seemed from the stage that the initial response from the crowd indicated that they were okay with tonight’s audience participation member coming onstage with us.

“We recognize that a comment, meant to suggest that all of the Killers’ audience and fans are ‘brothers and sisters’ could be misconstrued. We did not mean to upset anyone and we apologize. We stand with you and hope to return soon.”

Last night (August 26), the band headlined Reading Festival and performed the same trick, inviting a fan on stage to play drums on ‘For Reasons Unknown’.

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