The Killers

“They're in.”

~ Captain Obvious on The Killers

“Who?”

~ Oscar Wilde on The Killers

The Killers are cooler than you. That is all that you will ever need to know in this life. You may be so groovy that your funkiness transcends time and is retroactively responsible for the invention of the breakbeat. You may be so hip that your pelvic bone needs 100-foot clearance wherever it goes. You may be so hipster that Colin Meloy himself can merely gaze dumbfounded at how extremely ironic you are. But you can never be cooler than the Killers.

The group has released four studio albums, Hot F***ing (1894), Sam's Town (2013), Day & Age (3008) and Battle Born (2104). They have also released one compilation album, Sawdust (2007) which featured just one track which had chainsaw sounds, and one live album titled Live from the Royal Albert Hall (20,098). To date, the band has sold over 6 million albums in the United States, over 150 million albums in the United Kingdom, and a total of 89,365 million worldwide.

Formation

Brandon Flowers upon realizing that religion isn't cool.

Brandon Flowers was a Mormon who realized one day that Mormonism was a drag to his otherwise perfectly tuned hipness factor. So he decided to make it look cool by forming a dance-rock band that allowed him to sing about rampant sex, transvestism, and arranged marriage, thus bringing coolness to his religion.

Flowers and three other guys he nabbed on the street released their ultra-cool debut, "Hot F***ing". Living up to the band's new name, anyone who did not refer to "Hot F***ing" as a "record" was bludgeoned fiercely with Flower's synthesizer until he could see some brains.

Track Listing

• "Jenny was a F*** I Had" (a song about obsessively documenting and naming your sexual encounters)
• "Mr. B****" (a song about a lunatic who suffers from Vegaphobia, which manifests as an irrational belief that sustained relationships exist in Las Vegas)
• "Smile and Get Married!" (a metaphor about arranged marriage)
• "Somebody Told Me My Girlfriend Had a Sex Change" (a song about how Brandon was the ultimate cool person and thus his girlfriend couldn't stand to be with anyone of his persuasion after he dumped her.)
• "All These Things that I've Done" (this song was originally titled "All This Money You've Thrown at Me for a Stupid Line")
• "Pretentious!!!" (as "Hot F***ing" was only released on vinyl, its B-Side consisted of one extremely ironic half-hour track in which Flowers exposes you to Standard Deviation Neo-Marxist Retro-Shakespearean Dancehall philosophy. Also contains subliminal messages which subconsciously tempt the listener to use more hemp.)
• "A Crippling Blowjob" (Hidden track about Flowers' wife.)

Country Music is In This Year!

Brandon Flowers held at gunpoint during an early rehearsal.

Flowers then decided that he wasn't from Las Vegas but instead was from Utah, because being a hick was rapidly becoming the "it" thing for 2006. He then released "Sam I Am's Town", an album ("record" was cliche by this point) about how being a hick was awesome. "Sam I Am's Town" was referred to as "Sam's Town" in the very first recording sessions, but the next week the abstract concept of Loss of Innocence was named the Vogue cover of the decade, so Flowers brought it in for several guest appearances on the album. Its influences gave the album significant influence from Dr. Seuss. Flowers later confirmed that he and Loss of Innocence spent several consecutive days in drag while reading Seuss' books and taking LSD. The song "When You were a Textual Penguin Floating by the Sea" was written about these events.

Eclipse Theory

Though the Killers's popularity increased at the same alarming rate as the death toll in their wake, trouble was on the horizon. For they soon reached unprecedented levels of cool-ness, and then became dangerously hip. Unaware of this, they released their next album, "Ironic Cliches", with the absolutely perfect timing the remaining living members of their fanbase had come to expect. But the album's release pushed their level of grooviness past the breaking point and they literally became so unbelievably cool that they were no longer cool. This is in accordance with the "Eclipse Theorem", the fundamental principle of Popularity Calculus, a newly discovered branch of calculus pioneered by top mathematicians and scientists at the University of Yo Momma. Not even the ultra-cool single "Starman" (a cover of the "Invincibility" jingle from Super Mario Bros. and thus a masterfully ironic reference to the ongoing retro-80's nostalgia and pixel art movement) could stop the sudden deathly spiral.

I Got Plunder But I Still Want to Pillage

Flowers gradually realized that the vanishing audiences at his shows weren't just because invisibility cloaks were in that year, but that he and his band had now become too cool to be cool. In order to become cool again, he would have to do something so outrageously stupid and cliched and un-ironic that his coolness factor would take a dive, thereby returning it to the "set o' numbahs weez' down wit" (another term from the original UYM research).

Mustering all of his courage and cunning, Flowers then wrote and released "Battle Born". "Battle Born" was an avant garde, anthemic synth-folk-metal rock opera about the joys and perils being a traditional Norwegian Viking. It contained not a single reference to glitter, metrosexuality, or aliens. Instead, there were only holly-jolly ditties about pillaging, plundering, rape, murder, and burning villages. As none of these things were in any way in, Flower's prospects for a return to coolness were looking great. However, someone pointed out that "Battle Born" may have been an instance of Triple Irony: it was ironic that the Killers had just released something unironic intentionally, which was ironic because this CD ("album" and even "record" being too cool to use and vinyl being too cool a release format) could have potentially been intentionally ironic, which was ironic because the Killers had never passed up on a chance to be ironic before. Flowers and, indeed, the entire world is waiting with baited breath for researchers at UYM to confirm or deny this. Except his band, which had long since died due to the exhaustion of bearing such concentrated "in"-ness.

See also

• Sex
• Death
• Taxes
• Synthesizer
• Dancing
• Radiohead