5 things we learnt about The Killers on Annie Mac

Our favourite rockers are back! This is not a drill, we repeat, this is not a drill. The Killers’ new single The Man out now, and a brand new album called Wonderful Wonderful (which we suspect might be, well, just a little bit wonderful) is due this autumn.

Annie Mac invited frontman Brandon Flowers and drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr into the studio to give us the full lowdown about exactly what the band have been up to. Oh, and she also gave them full control over Radio 1 so they could pick their ultimate Party Playlist, featuring everything from Talking Heads to Whitney Houston.

Catch up on the best moments below…

“It was just as much of an experience for us as it was for them,” said Brandon, talking about The Killers’ surprise set in the John Peel tent at this year’s Glastonbury. (The festival eventually had to put up messages across the site, imploring people to keep away from the full-to-capacity tent; but the noise of the singing from within spread far and wide.)

“I wear these in-ear monitors to hear the band,” he said, “and the crowd was so loud, I couldn’t hear the band any more. It’s been a while, but it felt good. We played in that tent 13 years earlier, and it was nice, it was nice.”

“It’s evolving yeah,” said Brandon, speaking about the record making process. Wonderful Wonderful will be the band’s fifth album, all leading on from their era defining 2004 debut Hot Fuss.

“There was an innocence to making the first record and an energy that we had,” he said, “and we had less going on individually in our lives. Now we’ve got more going on and so it’s tough to get everyone together and on the same page, but we’ve finally got across that finish line.”

Their new album sees Brandon laying himself bare, with more personal lyrics than he’s ever contributed before on a group album.

“I’ve made two solo records now,” he said, “And I noticed that I felt a little bit freer to delve into this territory, because I wasn’t representing Ronnie and Mark and Dave as well. We got in to make this record, and it was a struggle to figure out what to write about. I realised that it’s ok for me to do that, and it’s still going to be a Killers record and I’m just doing my thing. So that’s how I sort of got permission to do it, but it took me to do the solo records to kind of get there.”

The boys admitted that their last album, Battle Born, perhaps displayed a bit of a lack of focus – but that’s all changed with Wonderful Wonderful. “Yeah, we were drifting a little bit,” said Brandon, “Maybe we were searching. But this time, it felt like we were aiming at the same thing."

“Last time we were being pulled in five different directions,” agreed Ronnie. “You work with five different producers, you’re sort of like, ‘Oh this trail, or this road…’”

For this album, recorded in a studio inside a Las Vegas record shop, the band worked with just one producer - Jacknife Lee.

The Killers all hail from Las Vegas. While for most of us it’s somewhere we might go once in a blue moon for a wild weekend of pool parties, for them it’s just, well, normal.

“You know, none of us had been abroad until we got a record deal,” said Brandon, whose family are Mormons. “It wasn’t until we left that we realised that we were from somewhere that other people saw as a mad place. Really, once you get outside of the glamour or the strip it’s surburbia, pretty much.”

Except, it’s not quite the kind of suburbia we recognise. “We have more advertisements for strip clubs,” admitted Brandon, “And slot machines in the laundromats. And there are probably more pictures of Elvis and Frank Sinatra than you are accustomed to.”

The Killers Party Playlist is available here for you to download