For someone who's used to filling arenas with era-defining hits, Brandon Flowers has been through the ringer. In 2023, he scrapped what was going to be the Killers' eighth album, citing an ongoing dissatisfaction with reverting to synth-driven heartland rock after the risky but rewarding sonic departure of 2021's Pressure Machine. Then, just earlier this month, the singer openly admitted to "really going through it right now," in an interview with The Times: "How much longer do I want to do this, what does it mean, why am I doing it anyway?" It's surreal, and more than a little humbling, to see a bonafide rockstar openly reckon with such an identity crisis. It's admirable, too, that he's approached Thrasher — his first solo album in 11 years — with what would seem like the perfect solution: going back to his roots. The album is a blend of both kinds of music, country and western, with scenery of small-town Utah and Nashville taking the place of Flowers's usual fabulous Las Vegas. A lot of Thrasher's best moments are a credit to the Americana Avengers assembled for it, ranging from the legendary David Rawlings to famed harmonica player Charlie McCoy. Clawhammer banjo scratches against acoustic guitars and chirping pedal steel on "Paradise," while the mariachi horns of "The Red Ground" add an exciting sense of melodrama. On occasion, Flowers kicks up enough dirt to make it feel like the tasseled jacket he adorns on the cover is truly lived in, too. Closing number "An American Dream" is an inevitably corny ballad with a title like that, but much like "A Dustland Fairytale" over 15 years ago, the twinkle in Flowers's eye and the conviction in his voice is what gets it across the line. The whole thing certainly feels less cynical than other genre outsiders having "gone country" this decade, and Flowers sounds as though he's put a lot of heart and soul into the project purely from the way he's spoken of it. Having said that, he still hasn't fully eradicated the Killer inside of him. Even when trying to inhibit new sounds and a new journeyman persona, he can't help but fall into a lot of the same Springsteen-sized tropes — see "Tiger's Blood" as the worst offender, which starts with a train-track groove that gets derailed in favour of arena rock and a Day & Age-era chorus. Flowers can't quite get his footing in "Miss America" either, where his attempts at detail end up as broad as the mountain ranges he's describing. Hopefully, Thrasher is still able to give Flowers a renewed sense of purpose that he can then bring to his bandmates and finally make an eighth album worthy of the Killers' canon. If he got anything else out of it, you can only hope it was the subtle hint to not quit his day job.