We ranked The Killers’ albums. Well, I did. These are my rankings. Mine. Sorry. Not up for debate. Unless that brings us more pageviews and engagement numbers. Which I suppose it does. So fire away.
11. Red (Christmas EP)
Solid, fun, but doesn’t add a ton to Christmas or to The Killers. Both are already pretty darn great.
10. Don’t Waste Your Wishes
Basically an extension of Red (Christmas EP). Same effect. All love, but it’s an also-ran.
9. Sawdust
It’s a compilation album, so it lacks cohesion, but it did give us “Leave the Bourbon on the Shelf” and their “Romeo and Juliet” cover, meaning it did its job.
8. Battle Born
The Nevada album. Great name. But there isn’t a ton on here relative to their other albums. Among the LP’s, it’s last, and that’s not an insult, but it’s just fine by the standards The Killers have earned themselves.
7. Imploding the Mirage
This needs to marinate a bit, still. I like it, but I didn’t love “Caution.” It felt like it had all the ingredients, but the lead line of the chorus fell a little flat. Some good lines from the album for Instagram captions, though. Slash snippets for stories.
6. Sam’s Town
This has a lot of The Killers’ classics, like “Read My Mind,” but Read My Mind gets a disproportionate share of the attention. “Enterlude” and “Exitlude” are fun, but the best songs on here, besides “When You Were Young” (obviously—no heresy here), are “Bones” and “This River Is Wild.” It’s a good album. Definitely above their mean, and that’s a strong mean, considering they’re the greatest band of all time. But it gets mis-sorted, and it has a few holes.
5. Wonderful Wonderful
This one hit hard, and it doesn’t really have any misses. Nothing came out of this that felt like a classic at the time, but it’s very on-brand, it’s emotional, it rocks, and “Tyson vs Douglas” is a diamond.
4. Direct Hits
You could rank this first, but this isn’t a sum-of-the-parts game. This is about the work as a whole. Though the album does deserve credit for adding “Shot at the Night” to the library.
3. Live from the Royal Albert Hall
This might have something to do with why so many people think The Killers are British. Again, as with greatest hits albums, live albums are all-star games and lack the story, but this is two hours and forty minutes of emotional gasoline. Can get you from 2:15 AM to 4:55 AM driving through the night if you need to get from 2:15 AM to 4:55 AM driving through the night.
2. Hot Fuss
Yeah, I’m gonna be that blogger for a minute. But hear me out.
The first five songs are dynamite. Not in the way that word is cheesily used to mean, just, “cool.” They explode out of the stereo. But once you get through “All These Things That I’ve Done,” it starts to fade. Should that have been the finale? No. We aren’t here to nitpick one of the greatest albums of all time. But this is why, despite holding four of probably the ten best songs by the greatest band of all time, this doesn’t come in first.
1. Day & Age
It’s a changeup. It’s a very good changeup. A bit more poppy. A bit more cinematic. And it does those things well. Between the Human/Spaceman narrative; “A Dustland Fairytale”—which would be their best song ever if it was two minutes longer, is incredible/operatic even while being too short, and yields the best lines Brandon Flowers has sung as he begs his mom not to die from brain cancer; and “I Can’t Stay,” the most un-Killers song The Killers have released, but a door-opener stylistically and an optimistic ballad about becoming a better person; this LP has the most to do with life of the six. No, it’s not as iconic as Hot Fuss, and it might not technically be as “good” as Hot Fuss, but if you’re listening alone, this is the one.
