It’s rare that a homegrown Las Vegas band goes on to make it big— and The Killers have made it huge while stubbornly maintaining their base in a city that places its priorities on other forms of entertainment. “It has always been a struggle for local bands in this town,” Flowers says. His first performance, with Keuning, was at an open-mic night at Café Roma, a coffee shop across from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “I have fond memories of playing in bars that no longer exist, and from what I hear, it’s difficult to find places to play.” “I think Vegas doesn’t get the attention, it doesn’t have the venues, it doesn’t have the outlet—a lot of times, it doesn’t have the seriousness,” Vannucci says, comparing the city to music scenes in places like New York or L.A. Yet Vegas has proven a rich vein to mine for The Killers’ brand of atmospheric, narrative pop, and judging by the tracks on Battle Born, the area continues to inspire their songwriting. Even while touring or adding vacation homes in other places, the band’s members have maintained residences in Las Vegas, and they established a studio— also called Battle Born—here in 2008. “I’ve been to more cities than I ever imagined I would in my life, and I still come back to this one,” Flowers says. “I love the people. I love the excitement of the service industry. I love the neon lights. I love Lake Mead. I love the smell of the creosote when it rains.” Flowers says that as he’s gotten older (he’s all of 31), gotten married and had three sons, he feels more inclined to take pride in where he’s from and to define Las Vegas in his own terms. And as the band plays the festival season in Europe this summer, they’ll proudly represent their hometown all around the world—in a way no other rock band ever has. “We try to bring a little bit of Las Vegas with us everywhere we go,” Flowers says, “from the Wild West to the feather boas.”
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DISCOVER
BATTLE BORN STUDIO: DENISE TRUSCELLO
The Killers (from left to right) Ronnie Vannucci, Mark Stoermer, Brandon 'Mowers and Dave Keuning at their Battle Born Recording Studio in Las Vegas
MEET
with our dads in the truck in Las Vegas, in the desert, is now starting to come through us, onto the tape, onto your CD,” Vannucci says. Bridging the gap in time and style from their Britpop-influenced first album, Hot Fuss, The Killers included “Miss Atomic Bomb,” a shimmering, expansive number that serves as a sister song to their breakout hit, “Mr. Brightside,” revisiting the characters and grafting echoes of its melody onto the new album’s epic Western mood. The title refers to the beauty pageants held alongside the spectacle of open-air atomic testing that took place in Nevada in the 1950s, and the iconic image of showgirl Lee Merwin standing in the desert in a mushroom-cloud-shaped bathing suit. “I think they were still doing “I have fond underground testing when I grew memories of up,” Vannucci, 36, says. “And so playing in bars every once in a while there’d be this that no longer weird gaseous pink cloud in the sky, and [because of it] I’ll probably exist, and from only live to around 40 or 50.” The what I hear, it’s song suggests a sinister seam difficult to find running through marvels such as atomic science or the Vegas Strip, places to play.” or love, while an eerie light radiates behind other tracks, such as “Flesh and Bone” and “Matter of Time.” The band’s local roots run deep. With the exception of guitarist Dave Keuning, they all grew up in Nevada, and they held jobs in casinos—busing and waiting tables, working as bellhops and wedding photographers, sorting out lost luggage—in the days before rock ’n’ roll began to pay for itself. Flowers spent part of his childhood in Utah, but his Nevada bona fides are for real: Asked why he chose to make his home here as an adult, he says his grandfather used to fish in Lake Mead during the Depression and sell the fish on Boulder Highway, and that his grandmother worked at the Golden Nugget during its heyday. “Being born here,” he says, “I will forever be tied to it.”