The New Yorker:

A recent residency at Caesars Palace doubled as a homecoming. As one band member says, “We never lost the Vegas.”

By Hanif Abdurraqib

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.

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