A boy in Las Vegas grew up staring at a casino sign from his bedroom window. That boy was Mark Stoermer, bassist of The Killers, and when the American rock band needed a name for their second album, that glowing sign became the title: Sam's Town. The record arrived in the autumn of 2006, exactly twenty years ago, and it split their world in two.
A boy in Las Vegas grew up staring at a casino sign from his bedroom window.
From Hot Fuss gloss to raw voice
The Killers had become famous on a wave of new wave: glittering synths, eyeliner, songs about jealous boyfriends. Their debut Hot Fuss leaned hard on vocal effects, including autotune, which smoothed every note into neon gloss. For Sam's Town, frontman Brandon Flowers refused that crutch. He wanted his real voice on tape, raw and unpolished, even if it exposed every crack.
The visual shift was just as sharp. Early plans called for a flashy gypsy look, but the band landed instead on motifs of faded glory. The album cover, shot by photographer Anton Corbijn, features model and singer Felice LaZae, and a desert bighorn sheep, the state animal of Nevada. It looked less like a pop record and more like a postcard from a town that had seen better days.
Critical backlash and first-week sales
Critics did not know what to do with it. Rolling Stone gave the album two stars out of five, accusing the band of abandoning the style that made them famous. Reviews were mixed across the board, and the word "painful" appeared in The New York Times. Yet in its first week, Sam's Town sold 315,000 copies in the United States and debuted at number two on the Billboard 200. In the UK it went straight to number one.
The lead single "When You Were Young" became platinum and topped charts, but the album as a whole felt like a gamble. Flowers had said he wanted Sam's Town to chronicle everything important that had led him to his current state, and he believed it would keep rock and roll afloat. Not everyone agreed. The backlash was loud, and the record seemed destined to be remembered as a misstep.
Reappraisal and multi-platinum status
Then something strange happened. Readers of Rolling Stone later named Sam's Town the most underrated album of the decade, a verdict that arrived in December 2009. The record that had been called a betrayal was now being called a classic. By August 2016, worldwide sales had reached nearly five million copies, and the album had gone platinum or multi-platinum in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and Ireland.
For the tenth anniversary, Bong Load Records reissued Sam's Town on double vinyl, limited to 5,016 copies. It was a collector's item for a record that had once seemed like a commercial risk. The reissue included two bonus tracks: a previously unreleased demo of "Peace of Mind" and a Pet Shop Boys remix of "Read My Mind".
The album's title track, "Sam's Town", carried a more melodic shape and an ambiguous lyric, while the guitars leaned toward country and garage rock. The songs were more serious than the debut, touching on breakups and lost love. But the heart of the record was that casino sign, the one Stoermer saw as a child, now pressed into vinyl and shipped around the world.