“I feel like I write a lot of solid 6s and 7s,” Brandon Flowers remarked recently. The lead singer of the Las Vegas rock band the Killers is not normally a paragon of humility and perspective, which only makes the accuracy of this recent offhand comment pierce deeper: He’s right. Despite more than a decade of striving, the Killers are inescapably a slightly above-average rock band. The numbers, pitiless as they are, pile against them: Even their Greatest Hits album from 2013 only had five great songs and thirteen other ones.

And yet, they’ve brushed greatness. It might have been an eon ago, but they still wrote “Mr. Brightside” and “All These Things That I’ve Done” and “When You Were Young.” These songs soar over their heads like diamond-encrusted jets at their shows to U2-sized crowds who treat the band like demigods, at least for three or so minutes. With successes like this to haunt you, wouldn’t you spend the rest of your life doubling down on a losing hand too?

They don’t hit their lucky number on Wonderful Wonderful, their fifth studio album. No tens here—sixes and sevens abound, for sure, a few fives, maybe an eight. Even mired among the sixes, though, you can feel the palpable yearning: Every Killers song believes its destiny is to be the festival closer, and that feeling is almost as convincing, on first blush, as encountering a song that actually fits the bill. “Don’t give up on me,” Flowers pleads on their new album, on a song called “Rut.” This is how much Flowers believes in his mission: He will attempt to wring a transcendent anthem from his inability to write them.

If there’s one thing Flowers and his band have internalized about the nature of their greatness, it’s that it requires proximity to ridiculousness. Thus, they start with “ridiculous” and hope that rest takes care of itself somehow, which explains why the first sound on Wonderful Wonderful appears to be a synthesized Ewok horn. The song it announces, the title track, is built on thundering toms and a rumbling octave bassline echoing into the big sky. The stage is appropriately set for an Achtung Baby moment, but Flowers decides, instead of a big chorus, to bleat, “Motherless child, dost thou believe/That thine afflictions have caused us to grieve?” veering right past Achtung Baby U2 straight into “stuck inside a giant malfunctioning mechanical lemon” U2.

Flowers picks himself up and dusts himself, undaunted, for the creamy-smooth falsetto harmonies and Jazzercise pump of “The Man.” The song, like other recent Killers songs, feels ersatz, a gift shop replica of a Vegas recreation of a Daft Punk cover of a Robert Palmer song. But it’s the most fun to be had on Wonderful Wonderful, complete with the sprained-ankle misstep-strut lyric “USDA certified lean,” delivered in that tremulous choirboy tenor of his. It feels, maybe, like a hit, and it’s one of the only moments on Wonderful Wonderful where Flowers bottles his particular brand of fizz before it goes flat.

As always, Flowers brings several gasp-worthy slogans even when he can’t muster classic songs. He has come to understand, deeply, the character he plays in his band and he excels at the sort of winking writing that never spoils the show. On the ballad “Life to Come,” Flowers instructs us to “Drop-kick the shame.” On “Wonderful Wonderful,” he implores us to “Clothesline the shame.” O shame, it bedevils and shrivels us all! By the time he tenderly sings “You got the faith of a child before the world gets in” on “Some Kind of Love,” it feels like the most exalted compliment you could give to someone in Flowers World, and it is only right that he follows this endearment closely with “You got the soul of a truck.” If his heart wasn’t gold, if his ear wasn’t tin, it wouldn’t be the Killers.

There are a couple of unintentionally sad moments on Wonderful Wonderful, moments where the props start to sag, the illusion of grandiosity threatened. On “Out of My Mind,” he announces his plan to “storm the gates of Graceland, to make you realize/I’m back to back with Springsteen,” before adding “You turned and rolled your eyes.” The moment feels uncomfortably like Flowers’ archnemesis, Shame, advancing on enemy territory. This is not why we have the Killers. You don’t go see Rambo to absorb the sobering realities of the military-industrial complex, and you don’t listen to the Killers to feel the sadness and hollowness underlying rock’n’roll dreams. You listen to the Killers for a cleansing blast of unwavering self-belief, to blur the line between oblivion and oblivious.

There are other troubling signs in the eternal bull market of Flowers’ imagination. The band may or may not be breaking apart, member by member. To witness the end of the Killers would be heartbreaking, like watching a foreclosure sign go up on the Magic Kingdom. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so let me break the fourth wall here, Brandon; just you and me here now. As somebody else once said somewhere, don’t stop believing. Please don’t let anything—departing members, declining sales, creeping real world irrelevance, even this middling review—deter you. If you can hold on, you gotta help us out.