The Killers’ Return to Las Vegas

A tense and anticipatory silence engulfed the Colosseum at Caesars Palace. It didn’t last long, but an entire universe of waiting seemed to unfold in mere seconds. Then a series of brightly familiar guitar notes twirled up from the stage and hung suspended in the arena like a set of Christmas lights. The lead singer of the Killers, Brandon Flowers, stepped into the light at the front of the stage, wearing a maroon suit and confidently smirking. The drums rushed in, and Flowers began singing, though—from my vantage point, in the middle of the sold-out venue—he was hardly singing at all. The roles had been reversed. The audience was the lead singer now and Flowers more of a conductor of their energy, absorbing the sounds of the band’s most famous song, “Mr. Brightside,” as it was belted by thousands of fans. When the chorus hit, Flowers put his leg up on a monitor and let his mike fall to his side. The floor shook with the force of people shouting joyfully along with the words.

The concert was taking place in the middle of the Killers’ two-week Las Vegas residency marking the twentieth anniversary of the band’s hit début album “Hot Fuss.” It arrived, in the summer of 2004, in the midst of a very specific early-two-thousands rock-music revival and positioned the Killers alongside bands such as Franz Ferdinand, the Bravery, and even the Strokes—all young groups who were fuelling what many considered a resurgence of the genre. For the Killers, this meant songs drenched in New Wave influence, with slick production and pulsating choruses. It is safe to say that there are few début singles as mammoth and well constructed as “Mr. Brightside,” with its infectious chorus, appealingly repetitive verses, and Flowers’s echoey vocals. The Killers have spent the past twenty years not living up to the track’s dominance so much as learning to embrace it. “Mr. Brightside” is ubiquitous in grocery stores and on TikTok. It has been hailed as the defining song of the millennial generation and as one of the greatest songs of the century. While shopping for a birthday card last month, I opened one that blared a version of the familiar tune. The show in Vegas was attended by a wide age range of fans—yes, the middle-aged folks who escaped to Vegas for a night out reliving decades past (i.e., me), but also people who were barely born when “Hot Fuss” came out.

The residency at Caesars Palace served as a homecoming, of sorts. The Killers are a Vegas band made up of Vegas guys; three of the four members were either born or grew up there. Their association with the city led to tender moments onstage, including Flowers reminiscing about his days working as a busboy in the very same casino and talking about how Vegas’s aura of inhibition can sometimes pay off in practical ways: the band first formed after Flowers responded to an ad that Dave Keuning, the group’s guitarist, placed in a local paper. There was a warmth and intimacy to the Killers’ residency that we don’t typically associate with a Big Rock and Roll Show.

On a Sunday night in August, a few days before the start of the residency, the band members were backstage in their dressing rooms at the Colosseum. When “Hot Fuss” was released, Flowers was in his early twenties, and looked the part of a young heartthrob rock star, with a boyish grin and a faint cloud of mischief often hovering above him. He was notorious for giving unfiltered interviews and for initiating verbal sparring matches with other bands. Now he is a married father of three, though still with an impressive swoop of brown hair atop his head. He talks in slow, thoughtful sentences, in a speaking voice that doesn’t entirely match the bombastic performativity of his singing.

Flowers was born in Vegas but moved, at the age of eight, to Utah. His father worked at a grocery store, his mother at a fast-food restaurant. In 1997, when he was sixteen, he persuaded his family to let him return to Vegas and live with his aunt. The working-class nature of Las Vegas, paired with the kind of work available in Vegas, means that local artists often work in the places that they might also dream of playing in. Flowers waited tables at Spago, the restaurant at Caesars Palace. He recalled, “I would take my tips, wherever I was working, to the Virgin Megastore. I still remember I bought the Strokes’ first EP, which was an import, and it just made me so jealous.”

While Flowers was working in the casinos, Keuning, a transplant from Iowa, was working in a closet, making a demo. “The neighbors had banged on the door a couple of times already, so I didn’t want to bother them,” Keuning told me backstage with a laugh, pushing long, curly hair out of his eyes. Keuning is the only member of the band who hadn’t spent a significant portion of his childhood in Vegas. He’d moved there after college, because it “seemed easier” than moving to L.A. What emerged from the closet was a bare-bones demo of “Mr. Brightside” devised through a kind of idle improvisation. “I had this cool-sounding note, I kind of stumbled onto it, and I needed to go somewhere with it. So then I just moved one finger down and then moved one finger down to this note,” he told me, gesturing with his fingers. “And that was the first three notes of it.” He placed an ad in the paper looking for bandmates, having found little success in the organic search for like-minded music-makers at shows and clubs around town. Flowers, who had never been in a band before, wrote the song’s lyrics. Flowers said, “ ‘Brightside’ having no second-verse change is simply because I didn’t have one. It’s great that it works, but I was not spoiled with other ideas at that point.”

Flowers and Keuning found a local drummer and bassist to fill out their band and played small venues, where they caught the attention of their future group members Mark Stoermer and Ronnie Vannucci. Stoermer, who was at the time bouncing around as a guitarist for a series of Vegas bands, eventually joined on bass. “There were a lot of bands, but there was nothing like what Dave and Brandon were doing,” he recalled. “I could tell they had something, the two of them.” Vannucci, another area musician with deep Vegas roots (his mother, he told me, worked at Caesars Palace when he was growing up), allegedly went up to the group at another show and told them, “You guys would be great if you had a better drummer.” He recalled, of the band’s sound, “I was, like, Man, what is that? It sounds like Suicide or early Cure or something like that. And I was just, like, Nobody’s doing this.”

The sense that nobody was doing this actually haunted the Killers in Vegas a bit, once the four core members began writing and performing songs. The sonic stylings that were popular in Vegas at that point were metal, rap-rock, some pop-punk. The Killers, with their large neon choruses and New Wave-revival aesthetics, were on the outside looking in at their home city’s music scene. Though they loved Vegas, Flowers told me that from early on they were “looking beyond it.” The band practiced in Vannucci’s garage and snuck into the band room at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, to record songs. They played frequently at Sasha’s, a club that catered to the city’s trans community, and put demo tracks on a Web site dedicated to unsigned Vegas bands. Braden Merrick, an A. & R. rep for Warner Bros., heard their stuff and flew them to Berkeley, California, to record new demos to send out to labels. Many labels passed, but eventually the band caught the attention of a U.K.-based outfit called Lizard King, and then Island Records in the U.S.

The Killers recorded “Hot Fuss” in the course of a year, between 2003 and 2004, during which time Flowers heard the Strokes album “Is This It” and scrapped everything that had been recorded up to that point—except “Mr. Brightside.” The band members were all working retail or casino jobs during the making of the record. Vannucci recalls sitting on a curb in front of his house with Stoermer, who was working as a courier at Quest Diagnostics, and telling him, “You want to do music, right? You don’t want to be a runner for a lab company. Fucking do music, because this is happening. We’re going to do it.” The album was released on June 7, 2004, and was slow to reach the mainstream. The band toured the world before rooms of ten people, and then twenty people, and then fifty, and then hundreds, and then thousands. They grew a grassroots audience simply by never leaving the road. Stoermer told me that, from 2003 to 2005, the band was touring around three hundred days a year.