“Fire in Bone”

“Fire in Bone” is about the same thing that all the best Killers songs are about. “I felt darkness,” Brandon Flowers sings with a tremble in the opening verse. “I felt alone/I felt unknown.” That is to say, he doesn’t feel like Brandon Flowers. He’s on his knees looking for an answer; you gotta help him out. How did it end up like this? But a transformation is coming. As he struts his way through the pitch-perfect ’80s tempest—an exquisitely layered Thomas Dolby-style funhouse produced with Jonathan Rado and Shawn Everett—he finds salvation. It’s the Killers’ most effortlessly soaring chorus in years. And up ahead, it’s a climactic verse that already sounds like the whole arena is shouting along with every other word. And as the sky gets brighter, Flowers basks in an arrangement so shimmering and reflective that he could spend the rest of the day flexing in front of it. In the final chorus, he sings straight from the heart, eyes closed, arms outstretched. “After all that I put you through,” he bellows, “here I am.” He sounds confident, vindicated, ridiculous. He sounds like himself.