I remember how refreshing it was to hear the Killers' debut single "Somebody Told Me" on the radio after the glut of nu-metal and rape rock bands that had made radio unlistenable to anyone whose knuckles didn't happen to drag the ground when they walked. Hearing an actual melody was such a breath of fresh air that I rushed to the nearest Tower Records and bought the CD mere minutes after hearing the song for the first time.
Part of me dreaded doing so, as it usually turned out that the song that made me buy the album was the only good one on the whole album. In the case of Hot Fuss, there were a handful of songs that were arguably better than "Somebody Told Me" and I found myself unable to quite pull myself away from the album for the next several weeks.
What excited me was that here was a band that had arrived fully formed, the confident first work of a band that was already mature beyond its years and bristling with an urgency that all great bands have had from The Beatles to the Stones to U2 and now The Killers.
A couple years later, sitting atop the rock scene, they issued "Sam's Town" and, while the album is an accomplished effort, it didn't seem as original a statement as had been their debut album. Instead, the band seemed to be more interested in wearing their Springsteen influences on their sleeve rather than continue to blaze their own trail.
And since then, every new effort seems to show a band less confident in their own sound making music that seems to stray more and more from the amazing template that was Hot Fuss. So when the band unveiled their new single today, I took my first listen with more than a little trepidation. Thankfully, "Runaways" isn't horrible. It has a sense of urgency about it similar to "When You Were Young", yet one wonders if it would have made the cut if recorded for Hot Fuss. At the very leastm it does raise our curiosity enough to look forward to hearing their new album, Battle Born, coming this fall.