BANG goes Brandon Flowers: Thrasher, his third solo album, is a full-throated dive into Nashville country — not the tasteful, beardy end of Americana, but proper honky-tonk, Nudie-suit stuff.

Flowers, 45 and born just outside Las Vegas, has never exactly been known for doing subtle. The same man who built the Killers on sky-high, scream-along choruses and then chased bigger sounds on Sam’s Town and Day & Age now swaps spangly disco-rock for cowboy-boot swagger.

The record’s got serious country muscle behind it too. Thrasher features pedal steel player Bruce Bouton, 85-year-old harmonica veteran Charlie McCoy, Dave Rawlings (best known as Gillian Welch’s musical partner), and Americana musician Margo Price.

Even with that heavyweight lineup, Flowers’ oddball writing still sticks out — in a good way, often. Opener Does It Ever Cross Your Mind? Is stuffed with pop-cliché confidence and gloriously strange lines, including: “I could’ve been born in Bangladesh / But I wasn’t, I was born here / With just enough jellybeans in my basket / To ask you to go a’wishing on a star.”

He’s at his best when he’s sketching characters with weirdly vivid detail. Tiger’s Blood spins a small-town escape story — a “cheerleader working the till” desperate to get out — and peppers it with images like “peach-fuzz boys getting hard in the corner on Mortal Kombat” and “a swamp cooler leaking down the bricks outside”. Closer An American Dream doubles down on the surreal, tossing out snapshots like “a Guinness World Record holder / for the longest fall living”, “Elvis in a Tesla Model X”, and “lights that flicker on hubcap chrome.”

But Thrasher also takes two big lyrical swings that land with a thud. Miss America is written from the perspective of a young woman in an abusive relationship, while Angel tells a story about a talented Black baseball player who dates a white woman, has a daughter, joins the navy, then abandons his family to become a drug smuggler before a police stop. The line “Chocolate and vanilla swirls / There’s gonna be a little girl” is as eyebrow-raising as it sounds.

Even so, Thrasher is described as a stronger, more enjoyable listen than the Killers’ 2021 Pressure Machine, and a front-to-back step up from Flowers’ last solo release, 2015’s The Desired Effect — even if it doesn’t come stacked with obvious big singles. One thing’s clear: westernwear suits him.