“The stars are blazing like rebel diamonds cut out of the Sun. Can you read my mind?”.-The Killers, “Read My Mind”
If you were to ask me what my favorite album of all time was, I’d ask you if “best of” albums count. If you said “no”, then my answer would be Nirvana’s Nevermind. If you said “yes”, it’d be the Killers’ Direct Hits. Originally released in 2013 to celebrate the Las Vegas band’s tenth anniversary, Direct Hits included thirteen songs off the Killers’ first four albums, along with two previously unreleased songs: “Shot at the Night” and “Just Another Girl”. While this album wasn’t my introduction to the Killers, it was certainly what cemented them as my favorite band. This was the soundtrack of my late teens and early twenties: the music that accompanied firsts and frustrations alike. Direct Hits had a song for every occasion because of the way it pulled from radically different eras of this band’s career. There was the new wave moodiness of Hot Fuss, the Americana yearning of Sam’s Town, the celestial whimsy of Day and Age, and the thunderous ambition of Battle Born. It’s probably for the best that I bought the damn thing digitally because if I got the CD I would’ve destroyed it from continual use.
Another decade has passed, and now the Killers have a new hits compilation, Rebel Diamonds, which offers “twenty songs for twenty years”, as the album’s trailer puts it. Despite having a similar purpose to Direct Hits, Rebel Diamonds feels a bit different, and not just because of the obvious fact that it contains songs from the three albums that the Killers released since 2013. Six songs from Direct Hits don’t return for Rebel Diamonds, and because Rebel Diamonds is meant to showcase the Killers’ career to the best of its ability, it’s just as important to talk about what isn’t included in the album as what is.
Omitting “Smile Like You Mean It” and “For Reasons Unknown” feels fine to me, because both songs only felt like they were included because they were released as singles. Both are overwhelmingly “okay”, and they don’t feel like they have a significant role in the Killers’ discography. I’m quietly kind of glad that “The Way It Was” didn’t make it in, but because it just feels like the slowed-down leftovers of much better songs on Battle Born. It’s the only song on Direct Hits that I skipped, and I don’t miss it. It’s odd that “Shot at the Night” and “Just Another Girl” didn’t make it onto Rebel Diamonds. Maybe they thought those songs’ identities were too tied to the other “greatest hits” album, but “Shot at the Night” feels like an essential Killers song from the five-year gap between Battle Born and Wonderful Wonderful. The only baffling absence from the album is “Miss Atomic Bomb”, the tragic companion to “Mr. Brightside” that provides new context to everyone’s favorite anthem of angst. In my opinion, this song is one of the most emotionally raw tracks that the Killers have put out, and it gives me goosebumps every time (that music video is probably my favorite ever). I genuinely don’t understand how “Miss Atomic Bomb” didn’t make it in, but I guess ultimately it’s the band’s decision as to which twenty songs best represent them.
However, Rebel Diamonds doesn’t simply remove songs from the first four albums for the sake of making room for the newer stuff, as it also includes “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine” from Hot Fuss and “Be Still” from Battle Born. “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine” is an early Killers song in the best possible way, with its electric sound and dark lyrics pulling heavily from New Wave music. It’s got the same sinister vibes as Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives” or the Smiths’ “Bigmouth Strikes Again”, with lots of wordplay mixing intimacy and violence. My one gripe is that “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine” is included before “Mr. Brightside”, making it the opening track. Based on Lizzy Goodman’s book “Meet Me in the Bathroom”, I think this is the chronological order these songs were developed in, but there’s a certain kind of energy missing when the album doesn’t immediately launch with the Killers’ biggest and most well-known song (Direct Hits starts with “Mr. Brightside”). “Be Still” is a song that initially didn’t click with me, but listening to it on repeat and hearing the way frontman Brandon Flowers talked about it in promotional stuff has really warmed me up to it. There’s something very earnest and emotionally vulnerable about it that drags you in.
All of the songs that returned from Direct Hits are some of the best rock songs of the 21st Century. I don’t think many people would say I’m being hyperbolic by saying that about tracks like “Mr. Brightside”, “All These Things That I’ve Done”, or “When You Were Young”. These tracks are burned into the mind of a generation and meant to thunder throughout arenas. I don’t need to tell you how or why they’re modern classics: you just know.
Getting into the newer stuff, Rebel Diamonds only has one song from 2017’s Wonderful Wonderful, “The Man”. Personally, I think the album only has two solid stand-alone singles, so this is fine. “The Man” is a really fun, self-deprecating deconstruction of masculinity, with Flowers citing his first few years of being a rockstar as an inspiration. It’s got a little funk and a lot of self-awareness, and in case you missed the subtext of all the performative cockiness, the music video makes it clear: powerful and arrogant men are losers who need to grow up. “The Man” is bold, goofy, and manly as hell.
My personal favorite Killers album from the last few years, 2020’s Imploding the Mirage, gets three songs: “Caution”, “My Own Soul’s Warning”, and “Dying Breed”. Each of these singles dropped different points during the thick of the pandemic, and honestly, they really helped me get through it. Not only were they new Killers songs, but they were new Killers songs filled with light and hope. These tracks are about taking risks in spite of overwhelming odds and pulling the possible from the impossible. They have this sense of brightness not just in their lyrics, but in the way they sound. The Springsteen americana vibes of Sam’s Town are back (“Born to Run” is clearly in the DNA of “Dying Breed”), but the youthful angst is traded for optimism and experience. There’s just a lively energy in these songs that was missing from Wonderful Wonderful, like a sign that the band had acquired a clear sense of direction that they didn’t quite have in the later 2010s (with some exceptions- the protest song “Land of the Free” should not go under the radar).
The next two songs on Rebel Diamonds are “Pressure Machine” and “Quiet Town” from Pressure Machine. I initially didn’t know what to make of that album, with its twangy, folksy focus on everyday life in a small town, heavily inspired by Flowers’ teenage years in Nephi, Utah. Imploding the Mirage was most of what I wanted from a Killers album, and Pressure Machine was… not that. I always knew that it was an album that was personal to Flowers, and while I respected it because of that, I couldn’t connect with it. However, listening to these two tracks on Rebel Diamonds, along with the one track that did stand out to me (“Terrible Thing”), I think I get it now. Pressure Machine is a bittersweet look back at the past, and as nostalgic as it gets, it’s not an examination through rose-tinted glasses. “Quiet Town” literally begins with the lyrics: “A couple of kids got hit by a Union Pacific train / Carrying sheet metal and household appliances through the pouring rain”, referencing the actual deaths of some of Flower’s classmates. These songs often carry as much honest tragedy as they do triumph, and I have a lot more respect and understanding for Pressure Machine as an album because of their inclusion on Rebel Diamonds.
The final three-song stretch of Rebel Diamonds is fascinating, as it’s the remains of a Killers album that never came to be. It contains “boy”, “Your Side of Town”, and a track that debuted with Rebel Diamonds, “Spirit”. I already reviewed “boy” for GateCrashers a little over a year ago, but I was pretty busy when “Your Side of Town” dropped this August, and I didn’t get the chance to gush about the return to the sound and feel of Hot Fuss that was supposedly going to be part of a new album. However, the album was scrapped a little after the release of “Your Side of Town”, and that hit me pretty hard because I was obsessed with the direction that “Your Side of Town” suggested the band was going in. This track feels like the secret lovechild of Depeche Mode and the Pet Shop Boys, peak New Wave revival. It could very easily be a prelude to “Mr. Brightside”, where a paranoid man sees infidelity everywhere he goes. But, at the end of the day, I understand why the band might not pursue an album like that, as much as it pains me to admit it. They’ve got families, they don’t want to do dark, brooding songs about suspicious loners feeling fear and loathing in Las Vegas. If the Killers don’t want to compromise their artistic integrity for something their hearts aren’t in, then I applaud them for that, even if the taste we got of their canceled project goes hard as fuck.
However, it seems that Rebel Diamonds gave us one more scrap of that album that will never be with “Spirit”. This song reminds me a lot of “Born Slippy .NUXX” by Underworld, which I’ll always associate with the ending of Trainspotting. Of course, I make this comparison as the highest praise: I love it when the influences of music are abundantly clear. As much as “Born Slippy .NUXX” feels like the perfect song to conclude a movie, “Spirit” feels like the perfect song to conclude this album. It’s reflective of the past while looking towards the future, an energetic promise that the party is far from over, even if this chapter is complete.
Rebel Diamonds is a surprisingly thorough outline of the Killers’ first two decades for only being twenty songs long. I really wish “Miss Atomic Bomb” had made it in, but I don’t have any complaints outside of that. Direct Hits will always be my favorite for sentimental reasons, but I imagine that Rebel Diamonds will win over a new generation of Killers fans the way the previous “best of” album won me over. At the very least, it certainly has me eager for the next decade’s worth of dustland fairytales.
