The Killers are edging towards their 10th anniversary as a recording outfit, with next year marking a decade since the release of their debut LP Hot Fuss.
Ahead of that, the Las Vegas quartet are this month releasing Direct Hits, a compilation of their biggest singles from across their four-album career packaged with two new songs (including their collaboration with M83), but despite the greatest hits set, the band have bemoaned the difficulties of getting recognition in their homeland, which they’ve slammed as “musically retarded.”
One-half of The Killers have hit out at the state of music in America in a new interview with The Sun, where drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr talks about how the group first found success abroad in Britain rather than in their own country.
“Breaking in the UK first was great because America is retarded musically,” says the sticks man. “And you can fucking quote me on that. It’s upside down.”
The drummer unintentionally echoes recent sentiments from ex-Oasis linchpin Noel Gallagher, saying that radio isn’t doing enough to support new music. “There’s so much great music that doesn’t get the attention. There’s a lot of bullshit on US radio,” says Vannucci Jr. “America is retarded musically… and you can fucking quote me on that. It’s upside down.”
Frontman Brandon Flowers backed up his bandmate’s views, adding: “I start to wonder, what do adults listen to? Do they listen to what’s being played on the radio? You should listen to something that’s for you – not about giving your virginity to your boyfriend on Saturday night. It is retarded,” he says.
“Every song is that song. And if 40-year-olds are listening to that rubbish, they’re going to raise kids on it. It’s not even music,” says the angered Flowers.
The band, who were last in the country to co-headline this year’s Big Day Out with Red Hot Chili Peppers to deliver their mythical arena rock narratives, also reflected on the frustrations associated with their previous successes, such as Flowers voicing his grievances with press paying more attention to his image than his music, over the release of 2006 sophomore Sam’s Town.
“Now that was frustrating,” he recalls; “we were so proud of that record. We still are… We put a lot into that record and so it was weird that, all of a sudden, people only talked about my moustache. I was thinking: ‘We just gave you songs like ‘Read My Mind’ and ‘When You Were Young’ and you’re focusing on hair on my face’. These are great songs.”
Both are featured on Direct Hits (out this week on 8th Nov via Island Def Jam), alongside cuts from Hot Fuss, third album Day & Age, last year’s Battle Born, and two new tracks: ‘Just Another Girl’ and ‘Shot At The Night’, co-written and produced by M83’s Anthony Gonzalez.
Flowers has previously described the best-of release to NME as feeling “like a great way to clean everything up and move onto the next thing,” which will likely be another hiatus to work on solo projects before reuniting for a new record, as drummer Vannucci Jr tells The Sun, returning to his own side-projects Big Talk and alt-country outfit Mt Desolation (with Keane’s Tim Rice-Oxley and Jesse Quin).
Flowers is likely to record a follow-up to his 2010 solo debut Flamingo while bassist Mark Stoermer had his own solo album Another Life in 2011; leaving Dave Keuning as the only Killers member without his own extra-curricular activities, but as the guitarist told Tone Deaf earlier this year, “I have songs that I worked on… that I don’t know what to do with yet. I can’t decide if I want to be on a solo album, or some random side-project.”
Meanwhile, Vannucci Jr confirms, “there’ll be much more music from The Killers… look at this tree – there’s still fruit hanging all off of this thing. This first ten years has just been the start for us.”
