The Killers performed live from the top of 30 Rock for The Tonight Show, unleashing renditions of two songs, “Dying Breed” and “When You Were Young.” The group gave a raucous performance for a small crowd of fans, who gathered on the New York City rooftop alongside host Jimmy Fallon.
“Dying Breed” comes off The Killers’ 2020 LP Imploding the Mirage, which preceded their most recent album, Pressure Machine, which dropped in August. “When We Were Young” dates back to their 2006 effort Sam’s Town.
Pressure Machine, produced by the band with Shawn Everett and Jonathan Rado, marks the band’s seventh full-length. To create the songs, frontman Brandon Flowers was inspired by his formative years in the tiny, remote Utah town of Nephi. The album is a concept recording about Nephi, told through the eyes of various townpeople. It covers everything from drug abuse and poverty to crime, homophobia, depression, and more.
“When I was writing these songs, I was thinking of things like Sherwood Anderson’s bookWinesburg, Ohioor that bookPastures of Heaven[by John Steinbeck],” Flowers toldRolling Stone, “where’s it’s all these short stories that take place in this one setting. For some reason, I had the audacity to try it myself. Once I realized they were going to take place here and they were going to be true stories, everything just really fell in our laps.”