the killers world tour 2022

The Killers

The Killers Announce 2022 Tour Dates

Last updated: 19 Jul 2021, 16:23:06
Published: 19 Jul 2021, 16:22:59
Written by: Erica Lauren
Photography by: Taylor Hill
Categories: Tour Dates Tagged: The Killers

The Killers have revealed expansive 2022 touring plans. The news followed their reveal that they will release their new seventh studio album, Pressure Machine , next month (8/13/21). The group had previously released their album Imploding the Mirage just last year. Ahead of their 2022 trek, The Killers have plans to perform at music festivals this year like Firefly and Sandjam Festival.

The North American dates will kick off next August at Vancouver, British Columbia's Rogers Arena and wrap up in October at Detroit, Michigan's Little Caesars Arena. See below for a full list of The Killers' 2022 tour dates. Tickets for the shows are set to go on sale this Friday July 23 at 10 AM. For more details visit the band's official website .

The Killers 2022 Tour Dates

Aug. 19 - Vancouver, British Columbia @Rogers Arena

Aug. 20 - Seattle, Wash. @ Climate Pledge Arena

Aug. 21 - Portland, Ore. @ Moda Center

Aug. 23 - San Francisco, Calif. @ Chase Center

Aug. 24 - San Diego, Calif. 2 Pechanga Arena

Aug. 26 - Las Vegas, Nev. @ T-Mobile Arena

Aug. 27 - Los Angeles, Calif. @ Banc of California Stadium

Aug. 30 - Salt Lake City, Utah @ Vivint Arena

Aug. 31 - Denver, Colo. @ Ball Arena

Sept. 8 - Houston, Texas @ Toyota Center

Sept. 9 - Austin, Texas @ Moody Center

Sept. 10 - Fort Worth, Texas @ Dickies Arena

Sept. 13 - Miami, Fla. @ FTX Arena

Sept. 14 - Orlando, Fla. @ Amway Center

Sept. 16 - Atlanta, Ga. @ State Farm Arena

Sept. 17 - Nashville, Tenn. @ Bridgestone Arena

Sept. 18 - St. Louis, Mo. @ Chaifetz Arena

Sept. 20 - St. Paul, Minn. @ Xcel Energy Center

Sept. 21 - Chicago, Ill. @ United Center

Sept. 23 - Toronto, Ontario @ Scotiabank Arena

Sept. 24 - Montreal, Quebec @ Bell Centre

Sept. 25 - Verona, N.Y. @ Turning Stone Event Center

Sept. 29 - Washington, D.C. @ Capital One Arena

Sept. 30 - New York, N.Y. @ Madison Square Garden

Oct. 1 - New York, N.Y. @ Madison Square Garden

Oct. 3 - Boston, Mass. @ TD Garden

Oct. 4 - University Park, Pa. @ Bryce Jordan Center

Oct. 6 - Pittsburgh, Pa. @Petersen Events Center

Oct. 7 - Cleveland, Ohio @ Wolstein Center

Oct. 8 - Detroit, Mich. @ Little Caesars Arena

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Most played songs.

Mr. Brightside ( 997 )
Somebody Told Me ( 949 )
All These Things That I've Done ( 934 )
Smile Like You Mean It ( 919 )
When You Were Young ( 884 )

More The Killers statistics

Gigs seen live by

18,445 people have seen The Killers live.

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The Killers Review – Las Vegas Stars Bring World Tour to a Stunning Close in Sydney

By David James Young

The Killers performed at Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena – and Liberty Hall – on Monday, 19th December. David James Young reviews.

Within minutes of The Killers arriving on stage at Qudos Bank Arena, confetti exploded from a row of cannons placed near the barricade. It wasn’t for one of the band’s signature hits (rather, 2020’s ‘My Own Soul’s Warning’), nor for a crucial moment in the song itself. Truly, it was a muscle flex – an indulgent, confident move executed purely because they could.

As Brandon Flowers ran from one side of the stage to the other, rallying seventeen-thousand devotees with a blend of preacher man conviction and Las Vegas razzle-dazzle, one thing was abundantly clear: this was not The Killers’ first rodeo.

The Killers – ‘My Own Soul’s Warning’

Since rising to arena status on the back of 2006’s multi-platinum Sam’s Town , The Killers have cemented their place atop the contemporary rock totem pole. There’s always a risk of an artist’s performances becoming formulaic as a result of playing the same set-list of songs in similar venues every night. So, how do The Killers continue to make each show feel vital? Consider the three Cs: catalogue, creativity and catharsis.

To the first point: after opening with ‘My Own Soul’s Warning’, The Killers came through with a hat-trick of 2000s indie classics, ‘When You Were Young’, ‘Jenny Was a Friend of Mine’ and ‘Smile Like You Mean It’. Considering how dated many singles from that era sound in 2022, it’s to The Killers’ credit that their hits have survived in this way.

Songs like the electric ‘Caution’ and the pensive ‘Pressure Machine’ demonstrated that the band still have plenty in the tank artistically. Even when it seems like you’ve done it all, you have to go back out there with something to prove – and The Killers, evidently, are in it for the long haul.

To the second point: even when you have so many adored songs at your disposal, you still need to present them in a way that is fresh and serves as a point of difference to the studio version.

The powerhouse work of drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr. – the engine room of the band – often dictated the ebb and flow of the live renditions. There were also subtle blends and reinventions, like the wailed hook of ‘Runaways’ giving way to the wafting synthesiser of ‘Read My Mind’, or the opening notes of ‘All These Things That I’ve Done’ sustaining for several minutes purely to induce an increasingly-feverish reaction.

No matter how many times The Killers have run through these exact movements, played these hits, and Flowers stuck out the mic to let the audience finish his sentences, each moment is reborn night after night thanks to the revelry of the audience.

To the third point: all different ages flock to The Killers, from the millennial diehards reliving their teens, to the enamoured Gen Zs who discovered these songs through cultural osmosis, and the blushing mums letting loose at their annual “rock concert”. (Sidenote to the latter: What an intergenerational treat to have America’s Gerry Beckley come out for a surprise rendition of ‘Sister Golden Hair’.)

No matter who you are, where you’ve come from and what level of fandom you’re at with The Killers, there’s something to be gained by being in attendance and losing yourself in the spectacle.

After the deafening sing-along of ‘Spaceman’ transitioned directly into a spirited rework of ‘Mr. Brightside’, the night ended for most of the audience. You could’ve walked out of the venue wholly satisfied after such a performance – and yet, for a select portion of devotees, there was more to be done, making a cross-city dash from Olympic Park to Sydney’s Entertainment Quarter, where The Killers were playing a very sold-out encore set at the newly-reopened Liberty Hall (FKA Max Watt’s).

Given the circumstances, it was only fair they opened with Hot Fuss deep-cut ‘Midnight Show’, which still felt as electric and exciting as it did circa 2004. For the next hour, a lucky few hundred watched as the unfatigued band powered through another round of catalogue classics and obscure fan favourites.

The band’s beloved cover of Joy Division’s ‘Shadowplay’ rubbed shoulders with setlist staple ‘Human’, while the Phoebe Bridgers-assisted ‘Runaway Horses’ was given a trot (sadly sans Bridgers) before another galloping ‘Mr. Brightside’ and a one-two of the criminally-underrated ‘Bones’ and ‘Run for Cover’.

The surreal nature of seeing this arena-filling band in such close quarters made the entire show feel like a fantasy sequence – resulting in a reality that we wish could have lasted just a little bit longer.

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The Killers Announce New Album, Plot 2022 Tour

‘Pressure Machine’ arrives in August

[Updated: August 13]

The Killers have announced their seventh studio album Pressure Machine . The LP is due out on August 13 via Island Records. The album was co-produced by the band, Shawn Everett, and Jonathan Rado (of Foxygen), all of whom worked together on The Killers’ critically-acclaimed album Imploding The Mirage , released last year.

The band has also announced a 2022 tour to support the album, and their previous release that never got to be celebrated live. The North American trek kicks off on August 19 at Rogers Arena in Vancouver, BC and will see thebans perform in New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Miami, and more. The Killers will be accompanied by very special guest Johnny Marr .

Tickets for these shows go on sale on Friday, July 23, at 10am local time HERE .

When the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the promotional run and worldwide tour for The Killers’ majestic, critically-acclaimed 2020 album Imploding the Mirage , “Everything came to this grinding halt,” says frontman Brandon Flowers. “And it was the first time in a long time for me that I was faced with silence. And out of that silence this record began to bloom, full of songs that would have otherwise been too quiet and drowned out by the noise of typical Killers records.”

Indeed, for the first time since 2004, the relentless momentum and pressures of being in a globally-renowned, stadium-shaking band stopped. Enter Pressure Machine : a view into the everyday realities of a small American town with a stark, tough beauty, and The Killers’ most restrained and resonant album yet.

A video from Brandon about Pressure Machine can be seen now via Apple Music. Click HERE to watch it.

A quieter, character-study-driven album, Pressure Machine lives squarely in Flowers’ hometown of Nephi, Utah, a close-knit community of 5,300 people with no traffic lights, a rubber plant, wheat fields, and the West Hills. Nephi is the place Flowers spent his formative years (10-16), saying, “Had it not been for advancements in the automotive industry, Nephi in the 90s could have been the 1950s.”

The album’s songs are based on the memories and stories of people that impacted him growing up, interspersed with commentary from current Nephi locals about their town.

“We were discussing [Brandon] moving to Nephi as a kid and being stuck in the middle of nowhere,” says the band’s drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr. “And during Covid-19, it started to feel like we were all in the middle of nowhere.”

Concurs Flowers, “I discovered this grief that I hadn’t dealt with,” he says, “many memories of my time in Nephi are tender. But the ones tied to fear or great sadness were emotionally charged. I’ve got more understanding now than when we started the band, and hopefully I was able to do justice to these stories and these lives in this little town that I grew up in.”

The resulting record is an aural document of growing up – and living – in the American Southwest, told from a myriad of perspectives. For the first time in his life, Flowers had complete lyrics before a note of music was put to tape. No stranger to inhabiting different characters in songs, on Pressure Machine he steps into the shoes of some of the people whose lives he watched unfold as a teen. The album weaves the threads of Flowers’ signature lyricism throughout his career into a perfect whole culminating in the most elegant album The Killers have ever made.

Through its characters and also its title, the album squares up to the unbending pressure of the American dream compounded by religious disenchantment. A born optimist, moments of beauty inevitably shine out of the grief of Flowers’s songs: the healing arrival of summer, the first crop of hay, sweeter skies. Pressure Machine’s stories detail the real life personal battles, overwhelming regrets, local tragedies, and the opioid epidemic that hit Flowers’ hometown, as well as every hometown in America. Flowers sings about the choices people make, for better and for worse, and the consequences of those choices; the ones who were left behind, and the ones that can’t be forgotten.

Pressure Machine’s album cover image was shot on the highway just outside Nephi, taken as photographer Wes Johnson passed a roadside inspirational display set up by a local Baptist church. Johnson took dozens of incredible images of Flowers’ hometown throughout the early part of 2021, many of which are featured in the album’s packaging for the physical edition.

The Killers: Pressure Machine [Island Records, 2022]

1. West Hills 2. Quiet Town 3. Terrible Thing 4. Cody 5. Sleepwalker 6. Runaway Horses (feat. Phoebe Bridgers) 7. In The Car Outside 8. In Another Life 9. Desperate Things 10. Pressure Machine 11. The Getting By

August 19, 2022 – Vancouver, CA – Rogers Arena August 20, 2022 – Seattle, WA – Climate Pledge Arena August 21, 2022 – Portland, OR – Moda Center August 23, 2022 – San Francisco, CA – Chase Center August 24, 2022 – San Diego, CA – Pechanga Arena August 26, 2022 – Las Vegas, NV – T-Mobile Arena August 28, 2022 – Glendale, AZ – Gila River August 30, 2022 – Salt Lake City, UT – Vivint Arena August 31, 2022 – Denver, CO – Ball Arena September 8, 2022 – Houston, TX – Toyota Center September 9, 2022 – Austin, TX – Moody Center September 10, 2022 – Fort Worth, TX – Dickies Arena September 13, 2022 – Miami, FL – FTX Arena September 14, 2022 – Orlando, FL – Amway Center September 16, 2022 – Atlanta, GA – State Farm Arena September 17, 2022 – Nashville, TN – Bridgestone Arena September 18, 2022 – St. Louis, MO – Chaifetz Arena September 20, 2022 – Saint Paul, MN – XCEL Energy Center September 21, 2022 – Chicago, IL – United Center September 23, 2022 – Toronto, CA – Scotiabank Arena September 24, 2022 – Montreal, QC – Centre Bell September 26, 2022 – Verona, NY – Turning Stone Event Center September 27, 2022 – Philadelphia, PA – Wells Fargo Center September 30, 2022 – New York, NY – Madison Square Garden October 1, 2022 – New York, NY – Madison Square Garden October 3, 2022 – Boston, MA – TD Garden October 4, 2022 – University Park, PA – Bryce Jordan Center October 6, 2022 – Pittsburgh, PA – Peterson Events Center October 7, 2022 – Cleveland, OH – Wolstein Center October 8, 2022 – Detroit, MI – Little Caesars Arena October 10, 2022 – Washington, DC – Capital One Arena

Privacy Overview

The Killers announce massive Australasian Tour for 2022

Frontier Touring are thrilled to welcome The Killers back to Australia and New Zealand for a massive nine-date mix of arena and outdoor shows on their Imploding The Mirage Tour 2022 in November-December. Originally announced in 2020 when COVID first halted worldwide touring, this will be The Killers’ first time back on our shores since their 2018 Australasian tour which included ten completely sold-out arena shows.

The Australia and New Zealand leg of the ‘Imploding The Mirage Tour 2022’ kicks off at Auckland’s Spark Arena on Monday 21 November, then down to Christchurch Arena, before visiting Brisbane Entertainment Centre, over to Peter Lehmann for an outdoor performance in the Barossa Valley, South Australia, Perth’s RAC Arena and Geelong’s Mt Duneed Estate. The Killers will then perform for audiences at Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena, then over to Hunter Valley’s Hope Estate for another outdoor performance before wrapping up at Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena on Monday 19 December, whew!

Frontier Touring presents: THE KILLERS Imploding The Mirage Tour 2022

Monday 21 November 2022 | Spark Arena | Auckland, NZ Pre-sale from: Thursday 11 November (12pm AEDT) On Sale: Monday 15 November (12pm AEDT) ticketmaster.co.nz | Ph: 0800 111 999

Friday 25 November 2022 | Christchurch Arena | Christchurch, NZ Pre-sale from: Thursday 11 November (12pm AEDT) On Sale: Monday 15 November (12pm AEDT) ticketek.co.nz  | Ph: 0800 842

Tuesday 29 November 2022 | Brisbane Entertainment Centre | Brisbane, QLD Pre-sale from: Thursday 11 November (1pm AEDT) On Sale: Monday 15 November (2pm AEDT) ticketek.com.au | Ph: 132 849

Saturday 3 December 2022 | Peter Lehmann | Barossa Valley, SA “a day on the green” Pre-sale from: Thursday 11 November (1:00pm AEDT) On Sale: Monday 15 November (2:00pm AEDT) ticketmaster.com.au | Ph: 136 100

Tuesday 6 December 2022 | RAC Arena | Perth, WA Pre-sale from: Thursday 11 November (3pm AEDT) On Sale: Monday 15 November (4pm AEDT) ticketek.com.au | Ph: 132 849

Saturday 10 December 2022 | Mt Duneed Estate | Geelong, VIC “a day on the green” Pre-sale from: Thursday 11 November (1pm AEDT) On Sale: Monday 15 November (2pm AEDT) ticketmaster.com.au | Ph: 136 100

Tuesday 13 December 2022 | Rod Laver Arena | Melbourne, VIC Pre-sale from: Thursday 11 November (2pm AEDT) On Sale: Monday 15 November (3pm AEDT) ticketek.com.au | Ph: 132 849

Saturday 17 December 2022 | Hope Estate | Hunter Valley, NSW Pre-sale from: Thursday 11 November (1pm AEDT) On Sale: Monday 15 November (2pm AEDT) ticketmaster.com.au | Ph: 136 100

Monday 19 December 2022 | Qudos Bank Arena | Sydney, NSW Pre-sale from: Thursday 11 November (12pm AEDT) On Sale: Monday 15 November (1pm AEDT) ticketek.com.au | Ph: 132 849

FRONTIER MEMBERS PRE-SALE via frontiertouring.com/thekillers Runs 24 hours from: Thursday 11 November Pre-sale timings staggered per show Ends earlier if pre-sale allocation exhausted

A DAY ON THE GREEN PRE-SALE via adayonthegreen.com.au/thekillers Runs 24 hours from: Thursday 11 November Pre-sale timings staggered per show Ends earlier if pre-sale allocation exhausted

GENERAL PUBLIC ON SALE Begins: Monday 15 November

Press Release:

Earlier this year while touring was still on hold due to the ongoing pandemic, The Killers released their seventh studio album, the quieter, character-study-driven album, Pressure Machine. The resulting record is an aural document of growing up – and living – in the American Southwest, told from a myriad of perspectives. Pressure Machine includes ‘Quiet Town’ and ‘Runaway Horses (featuring Phoebe Bridges)’. The band performed album track ‘In Another Life’ live on The Late Late Show with James Corden.

Imploding The Mirage was self-produced by the band in partnership with musical engineer Shawn Everett (The War On Drugs, Kacey Musgraves, Beck) and Foxygen multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Rado. The album, as a whole, is heavily influenced by the likes of Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen and New Order and promises something of a return to the Heartland Rock sounds of much-loved albums like Sam’s Town and Battle Born. The list of featured artists includes Lindsey Buckingham, kd lang, Weyes Blood, Adam Granduciel (War On Drugs), Blake Mills, and Lucius.

‘If ‘Wonderful Wonderful’ was an arm around a trembling shoulder, ‘Imploding The Mirage’ is a raised fist to the future. It’s the sort of attitude that could help us all endure such trying times, and The Killers’ sixth album sounds unbreakable too. They long ago reached their natural pumped-up radio rock peak, yet here sound as though they’ve been hitting the sonic steroids. The Killers have made another dazzling statement of ultra-modern pomp, and one arguably even more in step with new generations of alt-rock. It’s a musical DeLorean: rooted in mainstream Americana but speeding into adventurous horizons.’ ★★★★ – NME

The Killers first burst onto the scene in 2004, topping Australian charts and going double platinum with debut album Hot Fuss. Featuring hit singles ‘Mr. Brightside’ and ‘Somebody Told Me’, the album received instant popularity and widespread international success. Since then, the band have sold over thirty million albums worldwide, and headlined all of the world’s top festivals including Coachella, Lollapalooza, Glastonbury and received countless accolades including multiple Grammy nominations, American Music Award nominations, MTV Video Music Awards and NME Awards.

On the very same day that 2017’s Wonderful Wonderful hit #1 on the ARIA Album Chart, the band took to the stage at the hallowed Melbourne Cricket Ground for the 2017 AFL Grand Final and absolutely nailed their set:

‘The Killers’ set has already started to be considered as one of the greatest AFL performances in recent years.’ – Tone Deaf ‘The Killers have killed it with the crowd at the AFL Grand Final as they kicked off pre-game festivities in front of a packed MCG with a bite-size rock festival’ – Herald Sun

The Killers are exceptionally well-loved down under with all ten shows on the band’s 2018 tour completely selling out. Live music is back, secure tickets now for these not to be missed shows.

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The Killers

Imploding the mirage tour with special guest johnny marr.

Date Sep 16 , 2022
Event Starts 7:30 PM
Doors Open 6:30 PM
On Sale On Sale Now

Event Details

The killers will be heading back to the road to celebrate both pressure machine and imploding the mirage , along with their much-loved catalog of global hits, in 2022. .

Tickets go on sale on Friday, July 23rd, at 10 am local time via the band’s website or on Ticketmaster.com .

The Killers will release their seventh studio album, entitled Pressure Machine , on Island Records on August 13, 2021 . The album was co-produced by the band, Shawn Everett , and Jonathan Rado (of Foxygen), all of whom worked together on The Killers’ critically-acclaimed album Imploding The Mirage , released last year.

When the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the promotional run and worldwide tour for The Killers’ majestic, critically-acclaimed 2020 album Imploding the Mirage , “everything came to this grinding halt,” says frontman Brandon Flowers . “And it was the first time in a long time for me that I was faced with silence. And out of that silence this record began to bloom, full of songs that would have otherwise been too quiet and drowned out by the noise of typical Killers records.” Indeed, for the first time since 2004, the relentless momentum and pressures of being in a globally-renowned, stadium-shaking band stopped. Enter Pressure Machine : a view into the everyday realities of a small American town with a stark, tough beauty, and The Killers’ most restrained and resonant album yet.

A video from Brandon about Pressure Machine can be seen now via Apple Music. Click HERE to watch it.

A quieter, character-study-driven album, Pressure Machine lives squarely in Flowers’ hometown of Nephi, Utah, a close-knit community of 5300 people with no traffic lights, a rubber plant, wheat fields, and the West Hills. Nephi is the place Flowers spent his formative years (10-16), saying “ had it not been for advancements in the automotive industry, Nephi in the 90s could have been the 1950s .” The album’s songs are based on the memories and stories of people that impacted him growing up, interspersed with commentary from current Nephi locals about their town. “ We were discussing [Brandon] moving to Nephi as a kid and being stuck in the middle of nowhere,” says the band’s drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr . “And during Covid-19, it started to feel like we were all in the middle of nowhere.” Concurs Flowers, “I discovered this grief that I hadn’t dealt with,” he says, “many memories of my time in Nephi are tender. But the ones tied to fear or great sadness were emotionally charged. I’ve got more understanding now than when we started the band, and hopefully I was able to do justice to these stories and these lives in this little town that I grew up in.”

The resulting record is an aural document of growing up - and living - in the American Southwest, told from a myriad of perspectives. For the first time in his life, Flowers had complete lyrics before a note of music was put to tape. No stranger to inhabiting different characters in songs, on Pressure Machine he steps into the shoes of some of the people whose lives he watched unfold as a teen. The album weaves the threads of Flowers’ signature lyricism throughout his career into a perfect whole culminating in the most elegant album The Killers have ever made.

Through its characters and also its title, the album squares up to the unbending pressure of the American dream compounded by religious disenchantment. A born optimist, moments of beauty inevitably shine out of the grief of Flowers's songs: the healing arrival of summer, the first crop of hay, sweeter skies. Pressure Machine’s stories detail the real life personal battles, overwhelming regrets, local tragedies, and the opioid epidemic that hit Flowers’ hometown, as well as every hometown in America. Flowers sings about the choices people make, for better and for worse, and the consequences of those choices; the ones who were left behind, and the ones that can’t be forgotten.

Click HERE to pre-order Pressure Machine

Click HERE to watch the album trailer

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The Killers announce 2022 Australia and New Zealand tour

They'll also tour North America, Mexico, Europe and the UK throughout 2022

The Killers have announced a run of shows throughout Australia and New Zealand, set to take place through November and December next year.

READ MORE: The Killers: “There are a lot of young people unsure of their place in this world”

The ‘Imploding The Mirage’ tour, named after their 2020 album , will kick off in New Zealand, with shows in Auckland and Christchurch, before heading to Australia to play arena shows in Brisbane, Perth, Melbourne and Sydney.

In addition, as part of the concert series A Day On The Green, Brandon Flowers and co. will be playing outdoor shows in wineries around Australia, including New South Wales’ Hunter Valley, Victoria’s Mt Duneed Estate and South Australia’s Barossa Valley.

There will be Frontier Touring members and A Day On The Green pre-sales for the tour opening on Thursday, November 11, with general ticket sales available from Monday November 15. Sale times will be staggered depending on the show, so punters can check all ticketing details via Frontier Touring’s website .

These shows are set to close out the huge year of touring The Killers have planned next year. Beginning in April 2022, the band will play a selection of shows in Mexico before heading to the UK and Europe to play an extensive run of concerts that have been delayed repeatedly due to the coronavirus pandemic. The band will then play shows all throughout America before heading to New Zealand.

Despite the rescheduled tours, The Killers have kept busy in 2021, with the release of their seventh studio album ‘Pressure Machine’ in August. In a review of the album , NME ‘s Thomas Smith wrote, “The past year has allowed many big names the times to complete long-held fantasies or push creative talents to their brink, now ‘Pressure Machine’ joins them.

The Killers’ 2022 Australia and New Zealand tour dates are:

NOVEMBER 21 – Auckland, Spark Arena 25 – Christchurch, Christchurch Arena 29 – Brisbane, Brisbane Entertainment Centre

DECEMBER 3 – Barossa Valley, Peter Lehmann 6 – Perth, RAC Arena 10 – Geelong, Mt Duneed Estate 13 – Melbourne, Rod Laver Arena 17 – Hunter Valley, Hope Estate 19 – Sydney, Qudos Bank Arena

Related Topics
The Killers

The Killers announce 2022 New Zealand tour

Is there anything more perfect than spending an evening shouting along to The Killers?

Get your dancing shoes ready because American rockers The Killers are heading our way in 2022.

The November tour dates will be The Killers’ first time back on our shores since their 2018 Australasian tour, which included ten sold-out arena shows across Australia and New Zealand.

They will take in two stops of New Zealand while they are here, starting their tour of our side of the world with a huge show in Auckland.

Talk about the perfect way to experience The Killers’ incredible catalogue of hits.

The Killers 2022 New Zealand Tour Dates

November 21, 2022, – Spark Arena | Auckland

Tickets go on sale from Monday 15 November @ 12pm (local)

Find tickets

When do tickets for The Killers’ New Zealand tour go on sale?

FRONTIER TOURING MEMBERS PRESALE: Thursday 11 November @ 12pm (local) until Friday 12 November @ 12pm (local)
GENERAL PUBLIC ONSALE: Monday 15 November @ 12pm (local)

https://youtu.be/Bm_3TSvaThU

The Killers will tour our shores as part of their 2022 Imploding The Mirage World Tour, which will see the band playing headline shows and festivals across the globe in celebration of their sixth album, the ARIA #1 Imploding The Mirage .

Earlier this year, while touring was still on hold due to the ongoing pandemic, The Killers released their seventh studio album, the quieter, character-study-driven album, Pressure Machine . The resulting record is an aural document of growing up, and living, in the American Southwest.

So it’s safe to say that alongside classic hits like ‘Mr Brightside’, ‘When We Were Young’, ‘Human’, ‘The Man’, and ‘Bones’, The Killers have got a stack of new music to show New Zealand fans.

Since bursting on to the scene in 2004 with their double platinum debut album Hot Fuss, The Killers have gone on to sell over 30 million albums worldwide and headline some of the biggest festivals and stages in the world – cementing their place in music fans hearts and playlists in every corner of the globe.

Don’t miss your chance to see The Killers perform in this not-to-be-missed concert when they land on New Zealand shores in 2022.

The Killers will bring their new albums Imploding The Mirage and Pressure Machine to New Zealand stages in November 2022. Tickets are on sale via Ticketmaster.co.nz.

The Killers - Mr. Brightside (Official Music Video)

Top tips for getting tickets to The Killers New Zealand tour?

When are The Killers touring New Zealand?

The Killers will bring their Imploding The Mirage Tour to New Zealand in November 2022. They will perform at Spark Arena, Auckland on Monday 21 November.

When do tickets for The Killers New Zealand tour go on sale?

The Killers will bring their new albums Imploding The Mirage and Pressure Machine to New Zealand stages in November 2022. Tickets go on sale to the general public from Monday 15 November @ 12pm (local) via Ticketmaster.co.nz

Make sure you have a My Ticketmaster account

Get the basics covered before tickets go on sale by logging in and checking your Ticketmaster account ahead of time. If you don’t have a Ticketmaster Account then make sure you sign up in advance – Ticketmaster.co.nz

Sign into your My Ticketmaster account ahead of time

Remember to triple check your passwords, account information, and billing information are all filled in correctly in advance, that way you’re not facing any last-minute account updates when trying to process your order.

Keep your options open with ‘Best Available’

Save time by searching “Best Available,” which scans all sections fast – it’s quicker than searching sections one at a time.

Keep an eye on the clock

There will be a time limit applied to all transactions as they’re progressed through the ticket purchasing stages. Remember to keep an eye on the timer on your screen and move through the processing pages as quickly as possible (this is even easier when you’ve completed the account set-up stage we mentioned above).

Don’t refresh your screen

Stick to one window while you’re in the Waiting Room and when you’re being pushed through the Smart Queue and always resist the urge to refresh.

Hitting the refresh button means you’ll lose your place in the queue and, as frustrating as it can get, patience is the only way to win this game. Ticketmaster is equipped with sophisticated systems that are designed to manage and process ticket purchases as quickly as possible. The queuing system that appears on your screen will place you at the front of the line as soon as possible.

Remember: there are a lot of fans

We’re expecting this to be a very popular event. When a popular event goes on sale there are hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of customers all attempting to purchase tickets at the same time. Tickets are sold as long as seats are available, and when an act is as popular as The Killers, sometimes they go very quickly.

Be sure to follow the above tips to ensure you have the best chance of snapping up some tickets.

We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: The Killers New Zealand tour tickets go on general sale from Monday 15 November @ 12pm (local) via Ticketmaster.co.nz.

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The Killers announce outdoor shows on huge 2022 Australia tour

Is there anything more perfect than shouting along to The Killers in the sunshine?

Get your dancing shoes ready because American rockers The Killers are heading our way in 2022.

The November and December tour dates will be The Killers’ first time back on our shores since their 2018 Australasian tour, which included ten sold-out arena shows. But the band did give us a little taste about what we can expect from the tour when they headlined Splendour In The Grass’s virtual festival, Splendour XR earlier this year.

As well as playing arenas in major capital cities, they will also perform two unforgettable a day on the green shows alongside an outdoor show at some of Australia’s most beautiful wineries.

Talk about the perfect way to experience The Killers’ incredible catalogue of hits.

The Killers 2022 Australia Tour Dates

December 3, 2022, – Peter Lehmann | Barossa Valley SA
December 10, 2022, – Mt Duneed Estate | Geelong VIC
December 17, 2022, – Hope Estate | Hunter Valley NSW

Tickets go on sale from Monday 15 November @ 2pm (local)

Find tickets

When do tickets for The Killers’ Australian tour go on sale?

MY TICKETMASTER PRESALE (FOR SA & VIC ONLY): Friday 12 November @ 2pm (local) until Saturday 13 November @ 2pm (local)
A DAY ON THE GREEN MEMBERS PRESALE (FOR SA & VIC ONLY): Thursday 11 November @ 1pm (local) until Friday 12 November @ 1pm (local)
FRONTIER TOURING MEMBERS PRESALE (FOR NSW ONLY): Thursday 11 November @ 1pm (local) until Friday 12 November @ 1pm (local)
GENERAL PUBLIC ONSALE (ALL DATES): Monday 15 November @ 2pm (local)

So it’s safe to say that alongside classic hits like ‘Mr Brightside’, ‘When We Were Young’, ‘Human’, ‘The Man’, and ‘Bones’, The Killers have got a stack of new music to show Australian fans.

Don’t miss your chance to see The Killers perform in these special, not-to-be-missed outdoor concerts when they land on Australian shores in 2022.

The Killers will bring their new albums Imploding The Mirage and Pressure Machine to Australian stages in November and December 2022. Tickets are on sale via Ticketmaster.com.au.

Top tips for getting tickets to The Killers Australian tour?

When are The Killers touring Australia?

The Killers will bring their Imploding The Mirage Tour to Australia in November and December 2022. They will play three special outdoor concerts:

South Australia – Saturday 3 December | Peter Lehmann, Barossa Valley
Victoria – Saturday 10 December | Mt Duneed Estate, Geelong
New South Wales – Saturday 17 December | Hope Estate, Hunter Valley

When do tickets for The Killers Australia tour go on sale?

The Killers will bring their new albums Imploding The Mirage and Pressure Machine to Australian stages in November and December 2022. Tickets go on sale to the general public from Monday 15 November @ 2pm (local) via Ticketmaster.com.au.

Make sure you have a My Ticketmaster account

Sign into your My Ticketmaster account ahead of time

Keep your options open with ‘Best Available’

Save time by searching “Best Available,” which scans all sections fast – it’s quicker than searching sections one at a time.

Keep an eye on the clock

Don’t refresh your screen

Stick to one window while you’re in the Waiting Room and when you’re being pushed through the Smart Queue and always resist the urge to refresh.

Remember: there are a lot of fans

Be sure to follow the above tips to ensure you have the best chance of snapping up some tickets.

We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: The Killers Australian tour tickets go on general sale from Monday 15 November @ 2pm (local) via Ticketmaster.com.au.

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Date September 14 , 2022
Event Starts 7:30 PM
Doors 6:30PM
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When the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the promotional run and worldwide tour for The Killers' critically-acclaimed 2020 album Imploding the Mirage," "everything came to this grinding halt," says frontman Brandon Flowers. "And it was the first time in a long time for me that I was faced with silence." And out of that silence, this record began to bloom, full of songs that would have otherwise been too quiet and drowned out by the noise of typical Killers records." Indeed, for the first time since 2004, the relentless momentum and pressures of being in a globally-renowned, stadium-shaking band stopped. Enter “Pressure Machine"—a view into the everyday realities of a small American town with stark, harsh beauty, and The Killers' most restrained and resonant album yet.

The resulting record is an aural document of growing up - and living - in the American Southwest, told from myriad perspectives. For the first time in his life, Flowers had complete lyrics before a music note was put to tape. No stranger to inhabiting different characters in songs, on Pressure Machine," he steps into the shoes of some of the people whose lives he watched unfold as a teen. The album weaves the threads of Flowers' signature lyricism throughout his career into a perfect whole culminating in the most elegant album The Killers have ever produced.

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You may read our complete list of prohibited items here . This list is subject to change without notice at the discretion of individual events.

Exeter, Devon UK • Apr 11, 2024 • VOL XII

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Music , Music Reviews

Live Review: The Killers

Harry Craig visits the Emirates Stadium in London to see a spectacular gig from The Killers and Sam Fender.

“T his is a super-spreader event,” Brandon Flowers declared just before ‘ Jenny Was a Friend of Mine ’, “we’re spreading peace, love and rock and roll” – a not-so-subtle nod to the fact that COVID has postponed this tour three times. 921 days of waiting for the mirage to be imploded, and The Killers finally had the opportunity to take their sixth studio album, Imploding the Mirage , on the road. In that time, a seventh, quieter album, Pressure Machine , has been released, and Brandon, Ronnie and co. are arguably on the best creative streak of their careers – some statement for a band that has been putting out music for the best part of twenty years.

The support act was a young Geordie you have probably heard of, by the name of Sam Fender. When this tour was announced in 2019, Fender was relatively unknown, but in that time he has rocketed to fame with his second album, Seventeen Going Under , and consequently the stadium was already packed to see him, hours before The Killers were on. This was Fender’s first ever stadium gig, but you wouldn’t know it – the entire stadium sang along for much of his set.

Flowers became perhaps the greatest showman since Hugh Jackman

Finally, it was time for The Killers to come to the stage, and frontman Brandon Flowers rose onto the stage to begin with ‘ My Own Soul’s Warning ’, a ready-made concert opener from Imploding the Mirage . They then transitioned from one hit to another with ease; the opening run included hits like ‘ When You Were Young ’ and ‘ Jenny Was a Friend of Mine ’. There was no expense spared on stage effects, with confetti and pyrotechnics throughout and a huge cheer from the crowd as the giant screen asked, “Are We Human?” prior to the start of ‘ Human ’.

There was a healthy dose of tracks from The Killers’ two “COVID” albums from the last two years, and fears that these would fall flat with an audience more familiar with the band’s earlier material were completely unfounded. Songs like ‘ Caution ’ and ‘ Dying Breed ’ are certain to become setlist staples for decades to come, whilst I came away with a newfound appreciation for the disco-infused ‘ Fire in Bone ’. Imploding the Mirage was as close to a classic Killers album as they could get, and it came into its own in a live stadium environment.

Nevertheless, for a band renowned for its pomp and grandeur, there were some genuinely moving moments too. ‘ Pressure Machine ’, the title track from their most recent album, finally made its live debut following the request of BBC Radio DJ Jo Whiley, who has been instrumental in the band’s career. This was a long-awaited moment for die-hard Killers fans like me, for whom ‘ Pressure Machine ’ is one of the most beautiful tracks the band has ever released, a sentiment espoused by Coldplay frontman Chris Martin , who last year said he is “jealous” of the track. Another emotional moment came during ‘ A Dustland Fairytale ’, penned as an ode to Flowers’ late mother, from Day & Age , the band’s third studio album. The stadium was lit up spontaneously with the lights of thousands of fans as Flowers’ powerful voice filled everyone’s hearts.

The end of the set was non-stop, back-to-back hits, as one would expect from a band with twenty years of material to draw from. The slick transition from ‘ Runaways ’ to ‘ Read My Mind ’ was an exceptional piece of showmanship, and Flowers appeared genuinely moved by the crowd’s response, inviting them to join him in the refrain of “we can’t wait till tomorrow”. He remarked that “everything we’ve been doing these past two years has been leading up to tonight” – testament to the band’s special relationship with Britain.

The Killers are possibly the most American Kings that Britain has ever had.

Arguably the highlight of the show was main set closer ‘ All These Things That I’ve Done ’, in which Flowers became perhaps the greatest showman since Hugh Jackman as he beckoned to the crowd and was drowned out by the refrain of “I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier”. Of course, we all knew that there was more to come, even as the band went past the stadium’s 22:30 curfew. The encore launched into life with alien abduction anthem ‘ Spaceman ’, but there was only one song the crowd was waiting for.

On a weekend of national celebrations, The Killers gave us a double helping of the unofficial British national anthem, ‘ Mr. Brightside ’. Flowers didn’t need to sing as 65,000 fans belted every single word with the trademark fluency of every wedding karaoke or nightclub. Even as the Queen celebrated seventy years on the throne, this concert reaffirmed that The Killers are possibly the most American Kings that Britain has ever had. Flowers’ aspiration that “sixty-five thousand people would become one” certainly seemed to have been achieved.

Harry Craig

As Print Deputy Editor, Harry is active across online and print, across all sections, having achieved the Rainbow Award in 2022/23 and 2023/24, and being chosen as Member of the Year in May 2023. He is particularly interested in music, as former Music Editor, as well as Formula 1, queer issues, and geopolitics. Although often taking a factual slant, he isn't afraid to embody his inner Marina Hyde and express his opinion in a comment piece either!

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The Killers Announce ‘Hot Fuss’ 20th Anniversary Residency in Las Vegas

By Andy Greene

Andy Greene

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Rolling Stone may receive an affiliate commission.

The Killers will celebrate the 20th anniversary of their debut LP, Hot Fuss , by playing the album straight through at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace in their hometown of Las Vegas. Eight nights are booked between August 14 through August 30. Tickets go on sale January 27.

All four members of the band — singer Brandon Flowers, guitarist Dave Keuning, bassist Mark Stoermer, and drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr — will participate in the shows. This is a rarity since Stoermer stopped touring with the group in 2016 due to hearing issues and burnout from the road, and Keuning stepped away between 2017 and 2020 to spend more time with his family. “Nobody is going to sympathize with me,” Keuning told Rolling Stone in 2021, “but physically and mentally, I could not go to the airport and devote myself to two more years of being gone. I could not do it. I was going crazy.”

The Hot Fuss anniversary gigs in Las Vegas are a great chance for the band to reunite onstage and revisit the songs that launched them. Hot Fuss tunes like “Mr. Brightside,” “Somebody Told Me,” “All Things Things That I’ve Done,” “Smile Like You Mean It,” “Andy, You’re a Star,” and “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine” have been consistent parts of their stage show for the last two decades. It’s hard to imagine they’ll ever be able to play a concert without playing at least “Mr. Brightside,” one of the most beloved rock songs of the 21st century.

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Books | The most infamous serial killers all seem to…

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Books | the most infamous serial killers all seem to have something in common — they’re from around the midwest.

John Wayne Gacy on Dec. 21, 1978, at the Des Plaines Police Department. (Des Plaines Police Department)

What is it about the Midwest that breeds so many serial killers?

What is in the soil that grows the sort of grisly murderers who launch a million headlines? Adam Rapp has wondered for a long time. He was born in Chicago and raised in Joliet in the 1970s, when Joliet was not the best place to grow up. Gangs proliferated. There were rumors of white vans whose drivers offered neighborhood boys a peek at a Playboy. You couldn’t escape to Chicago — killer clown John Wayne Gacy and nurse killer Richard Speck came out of there. Rapp’s father lived in Wilmette, but then John Carpenter’s “Halloween” came out when he was 10 and was based in Haddonfield, a fictional Illinois town “that looked like Wilmette, oak trees, porch swings. And that drove home the immediacy of my worries — I mean, how was I going to use my keys to get into my house and escape from a killer if my hands were shaking that bad?”

Rapp was closer to his fears than he knew.

When he was 5, his family was leaving the Kankakee area when “a driver pulled up next to us on I-57 brandishing a rifle, traveling in the oncoming lane.” Rapp was asleep beside his sister, who locked eyes with the gunman. Their mother, sitting in the passenger’s seat, looked over and clutched their baby brother (Anthony Rapp, who later became an acclaimed theater actor).

The gunman drove on.

That night, the mystery driver, a Chicagoan named Henry Brisbon, later dubbed the “I-57 killer,” killed three people. He was sent to Stateville Correctional , where Rapp’s mother worked as a nurse. (She would also serve as a material witness in Brisbon’s trial.) Stateville, a stone’s throw from their apartment, was home to Speck; Rapp’s mother was friends with the nurses that Speck killed. Stateville also briefly housed Gacy, and near the end of her career, Rapp’s mother attended to Gacy on the day of his execution.

The playwright and author Adam Rapp, a Joliet native, whose new book, "Wolf at the Table," tells a multi-generational tale of a single family negotiating serial killers and histories of mental illness. (Sham Hinchey/Little/Brown)

Adam Rapp went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright and author whose themes tend to spring out of legacies of stray violence and social alienation. His new adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s “The Outsiders” — arguably the greatest young adult novel to address those topics — recently opened in previews on Broadway. But also nested in that career has been a question that Rapp hasn’t been able to shake since he was a child:

Why do so many famous murderers come out of the Midwest?

This story offers no answers. How could it? Murder is not a Midwest invention. But why then does the Midwest — and the Chicago area, in particular — appear to nurture such a grim, sensational history of unimaginable killings? Rapp can’t say. But lots of writers have tried. This spring alone, a pair of new novels chew over the question: There’s Rapp’s family epic, “Wolf at the Table,” and Cynthia Pelayo’s “Forgotten Sisters,” which tackles the persistent real-life rumor that a serial killer is targeting young men and dumping their bodies in the Chicago River. Spoiler: As compelling as both of these books read, neither get any closer to an understanding. Next month is the 100th anniversary of the killing of 14-year-old Bobby Franks by two University of Chicago students named Leopold and Loeb. At least morally, we are no closer to understanding that, either. Statistically, historically, New York and California generate more killers than the Midwest, but neither of those places wear them quite like the wheat fields and anonymous apartment complexes of the Midwest.

One reason, perhaps: Free-floating menace doesn’t slip into densely-populated areas as cleanly, or lazily, as it does in literature about the Midwest. I’ve been reading a lot of recent novels and histories about famous (and fictional) Midwest murders and often the covers match the barrenness of the land to a moral barrenness: Bleak horizons and cobalt skies, windmills watching in silence, rusting pitchforks, crumbling wells, dirt-cellar floors and miles of unmarked graves. Our ominous middle of the nowhere seems to be everywhere from Ohio to Nebraska.

As a native of the East Coast (the seat of publishing), I confess to plenty of regional biases: The terrific first line of Chicago novelist Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” — “When I think of my wife, I always think of her head” — lands differently knowing it takes place in Missouri. I don’t think I’m being mean. Lori Rader-Day, another Chicago novelist with knack for Midwest murder, explained: “Cornfields are creepy, man. The Midwest may be written off as a harmless nowhere, where community is everything, everyone cares for each other. But people do feel isolated. I think it’s one reason people turn towards evil.”

As she once wrote: There’s so much potential for darkness in the Midwest.

Eight nurses were murdered by Richard Speck in 1966 in a townhome in the 2300 block of East 100th Street, March 29, 2024. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)

And that’s not even including Chicago, the nation’s haunted house. Pelayo was born in Puerto Rico and raised in the Northwest Side neighborhood of Hermosa, and still writes her books from there. She said whenever she tours for a new novel, she inevitably meets audiences that assume she pens her horror-tinged thrillers “from a bombed-out hellhole, so I tell them: I’m not scared of Chicago, I love it, I raised children here, I do dumb stuff at night.

“And yet, of course — we have this history of murder that’s hard to really understand.”

Her novels regard Chicago’s past and present as uneasy neighbors, sometimes fantastically, usually violently. We’re reminded in “Forgotten Sisters” of generations of “long-submerged bloated corpses” settled on the floor of the Chicago River. Characters hear echos from the old Union Stockyards — “a great cacophony” of butchering. As in her other books — which address the local history of gun violence and inequality — our contemporary ugliness gets pressed against the city’s paradoxical history with Walt Disney (born here) and “The Wizard of Oz” (written here). Without giving anything away, “Forgotten Sisters” offers a bit of “The Little Mermaid,” meets the real-life S.S. Eastland river disaster of 1915, meets recent whispers (denied by Chicago authorities) of a “Smiley Face” serial killer stalking the city, targeting predominantly young white males.

“We romanticize the death of millionaires on the Titanic,” she said, “and forget the 844 people who died on the Eastland (in the Chicago River) were largely immigrants who helped to build Chicago. And the way we’ve forgotten their loss, that’s a double tragedy.”

So, in her novel, there’s karmic, supernatural revenge for the wrongs of the past.

Pelayo has always wondered, she said, “if there’s something more” to so much horrible spectacle in the Midwest. But then, she brakes just short of supernatural explanations.

His mother kept most of her professional connections to famous killers a secret. She rarely discussed her work at Stateville with her children. They knew she had lived in Manteno not far from the state psychiatric hospital, but not until after she died in 1997 and an aunt gave Rapp a shoebox of his mother’s possessions did he piece together her broader history with mental illness: “That started my weird fascination with this simple woman’s frequent proximity to extraordinary acts of male violence.” But of course, there’s nothing supernatural to that. His book, “Wolf at the Table,” is fiction: It tells the story of a family marked by mental illness. A father abandons his North Shore life after a voice tells him to kill. A brother spends years wandering, and killing, largely unrecognized. There’s also a main character who reads an awful lot like Rapp’s mother.

She’s a nurse who works with Gacy, and also knew Gloria Davy, one of the (real-life) nurses killed by Speck in 1966 on the Far South Side. The morning she learns Davy was murdered, Rapp’s character still puts on her nurses uniform and reports to work. “As her train clatters past Wrigley Field,” Rapp writes, she gets hyper-aware of her uniform, and this latest Chicago tragedy: “Do they think she’s playing some cruel joke?”

Richard Speck, center, is brought to the Joliet prison Diagnostic Center for processing after being given the death sentence at his trial in Peoria on June 5, 1967. Sheriff Willard Koeppel, of Peoria, left, and undersheriff Richard Diekhoff, right, escort Speck, who will then be transferred to Stateville prison. (William Yates/Chicago Tribune)

In the second season of the Hulu series “Fargo,” an unseen narrator (voiced by Martin Freeman) reads from a volume titled “The Big Book of True Crime in the Midwest.” It’s a fictional book conceived by series creator Noah Hawley (a New Yorker), and like many histories of Midwest murder, it looks light on Native American massacres and white supremacy. But it also appears ancient and dusty, and therefore, irrefutable.

After all, the image of Midwest as a cauldron of violence was shaped through writing, and predates the days of Al Capone. Journalists recycled the idea that the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was divine retribution for a place so corrupt. As early as 1899, Henry Blake Fuller, among Chicago’s first full-time novelists, gave a talk at the Fine Arts Building in which he described the city as “a hideously makeshift horror.” He wasn’t even referring to H.H. Mudgett, executed three years earlier, and now considered among the United States‘ first serial killers. From his Englewood drugstore, Mudgett (better known as H.H. Holmes) preyed on visitors to the World’s Columbia Exposition; more than century later, he’s known as the subject of the best-selling “Devil in the White City.” Yet not long after the fair closed in 1893, there were already best-selling accounts — written by Chicago police officers — of crime at the event.

By the time Theodore Dreiser published “An American Tragedy” (1925) and Richard Wright wrote his own American tragedy “Native Son” (1940) — both centered on accidental, yet seemingly inevitable killings — the image of a fetid metropolis encircled by dark fields of scarecrows was indelible. It became less shocking to hear of a William Heirens, the Lipstick Killer of Lincolnwood, who wrote in lipstick at the scene of a 1946 murder: “Catch me before I kill more. I can not control myself.” Yet, as Sarah Weinman, among our finest contemporary crime writers, told me: “It’s important not to think of these things as happening because of something in the local water. There’s nothing in the water. People link horrible events, though the only thing connecting killers like this is the often-marginalized communities they prey on. And that’s not a Midwestern thing.”

Still, when Harry MacLean was growing up in Nebraska, if you wanted to know where the violent people were, he said, you looked east to Chicago. “Then Charlie Starkweather came along in 1958 and transformed our perception of ourselves,” MacLean said. As he wrote in last winter’s “Starkweather: The Untold Story of the Killing Spree that Changed America,” the landscape may be cold and lonely, populated by cows “huddled” against haystacks on bland afternoons, but if you “played by the rules,” took care of your family, remained decent and went to church, then “life will be good.”

It was a white Protestant worldview, and Starkweather, at 19, upset its math. He drove through Lincoln towards Wyoming with his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, killing indiscriminately. He killed in homes, fields and on highways. He had no history of behavioral issues. He had a stable home. “But I remember true fear on adult faces,” MacLean told me. “There was a sense Charlie Starkweather could be hiding in your barn, or step into your living room. I heard stories of people hiding out as far as Iowa. A sense of terror, across a region, was new.” Starkweather eventually killed 10 people.

A year later, four members of the Clutter family were murdered in Kanas, also seemingly at random, a crime immortalized by Truman Capote in his classic “In Cold Blood,” which painted a portrait of endless fields of wheat so isolating it was mainly called “out there.”

The land itself, see, was lethal.

As far back as the 19th century, when the homicidal Bender family trapped, robbed and murdered wayward travelers who happened to be passing by their home on the southwest Kansas plains — recounted by Susan Jonusas’s history, “Hell’s Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier” (2022) — visitors wrote home that the buildings here wanted to sink into the dirt. When husbands vanished en route to Illinois, wives were told that it was as if the prairie swallowed them.

Ed Gein is led away by Sheriff Arthur Schley near Plainfield, Wisconsin, in 1957 after he admitted to murdering two women and robbing graves. (John Croft/Minneapolis Tribune)

Rapp, who is also writing an upcoming TV series about the Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein, “can find the bleakness of this region at times especially isolating, opening brooding thoughts for certain men in need of vitamin D.” Gein’s crimes inspired the Maywood native Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel “Psycho,” subsequently inspiring the Alfred Hitchcock film, and decades later, the Buffalo Bill killer of Thomas Harris’ “Silence of the Lambs.” After Gein’s mother died, he started robbing graves and killing people, partly for taxidermy. He lived alone in a farm house without water, due north of Wisconsin Dells.

Indeed, isolation, physical and mental, plays an outsize role in these tales.

“Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls,” Kathleen Hale’s 2022 account of a stabbing death outside Milwaukee, is driven by boredom, a suburban legend and the 12-year-olds who believe it. Yet, as Bloch wrote about Gein, Wisconsin was “hardly the proper setting for such characters.” The Slenderman killing was not unlike the killing of Bobby Franks by Leopold and Loeb in that both murders came out of intense friendships between seeming innocent kids. Leopold and Loeb, college students, came from rich Chicago families. Leopold, wrote crime writer Miriam Allen deFord decades later, was taught as a young child that his family’s “great wealth gave him special privileges and immunities.”

Because of course it does.

But that doesn’t fit the archetypal Midwest character. Generosity, ordinariness, neighborliness — that’s who we are. It’s also those qualities, however, that led John Wayne Gacy — a party clown and REO Speedwagon fan in good standing with the Junior Chamber of Commerce — to go unsuspected. When women began vanishing around Gein’s farm, he would joke with locals that he was definitely responsible. As if in a parody of Midwest naiveté, Leopold and Loeb went to a hardware store on 43rd Street and bought a single rope, one chisel and a vat of hydrochloric acid, no questions asked.

Is this why the Midwest has so many notorious crimes?

Because Midwesterners are too nice? It’s as good an answer as any. But doubtful. Rapp believes: “This is an American narrative, a dream of a home, a garage, a car, four kids, and what comes with it are killing sprees. And we don’t know why, not really.” Evanston writer Nina Barrett, author of a 2018 history “The Leopold & Loeb Files,” said the relative newness of the University of Chicago in 1924 led some Chicagoans to ask if liberals art educations were breeding immorality. In Nebraska, after Starkweather’s capture, locals blamed the radicalness of Elvis, James Dean, greasers and the sudden popularity of rock music. Today, MacLean said, people still visit the open pastures where the killings occurred, as though some new clue might reveal itself in the soil.

But if I had to bet, Bruce Springsteen has come the closest to the truth.

His bone-dry 1982 acoustic masterwork “Nebraska” was written about Starkweather, and narrated by the killer. At the song’s end, Charlie is asked why he did it, and his reply is plaintive, honest and chilling: “Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.”

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How Alvin Bragg Hitched His Fate to Trump’s

The Manhattan D.A. campaigned as the best candidate to go after the former president. Now he finds himself leading Trump’s first prosecution — and perhaps the only one before the November election.

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By Kim Barker , Jonah E. Bromwich and Michael Rothfeld

Kim Barker, Jonah E. Bromwich and Michael Rothfeld interviewed more than 70 of Alvin Bragg’s friends and colleagues and legal and political experts for this article. Rothfeld and Bromwich have written extensively about the case against Trump; Barker, an investigations reporter, examined Bragg’s legal record.

April 9, 2024

Reporters vied for seats in the briefing room, some even crouching on the floor. They all knew, on this Tuesday in early April 2023, that Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, was about to announce something momentous: the first criminal charges against a former American president.

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Yet when Bragg walked quietly onto the stage, it took a second or two for the audience to realize he was there. In his dark blue suit and dark-rimmed glasses, he blended into the dark blue curtains behind the lectern. He took out his notes and thanked everyone for coming. He was flanked by poster boards with flow charts, but that was as far as the showmanship went.

The accusations he went on to level against Donald J. Trump were salacious, involving money paid to a porn star just before the 2016 presidential election so she would remain silent about her claim that they had sex a decade before. But Bragg studiously avoided mentioning sex or hush money during the 13-minute event, focusing instead on 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up the payment. Bragg looked frequently at his notes while he spoke, mostly in a monotone. He seemed unprepared (or unwilling) to answer the most obvious questions: why he had abandoned a different case, about whether Trump had falsified the valuations of properties, or why he thought he could make these new charges stick.

Bragg displayed passion only once, in response to a question about why he brought a hush-money case after his predecessor and federal prosecutors had not.

“This is the business capital of the world,” Bragg said, his voice rising. “We regularly do cases involving false business statements. The bedrock — in fact, the basis for business integrity and a well-functioning business marketplace — is true and accurate record-keeping. That’s the charge that’s brought here, falsifying New York State business records.”

True and accurate record-keeping. It’s hardly the stuff of history books. But a year later, it is this paperwork case — not the three other indictments that have dominated the news, involving accusations of trying to overturn a presidential election and mishandling highly classified documents — that will in the coming days make history as Trump’s first criminal trial, and perhaps the only one before the election in November.

Hardly anyone figured that it would play out this way. Bragg himself had said that “broader justice may warrant another case going first.” Yet with those other cases mired in legal skirmishing and delay, it is Bragg, a Harvard-trained prosecutor who has often appeared to be a most uncomfortable, un-media-savvy public figure, who will now face off against the reality-television star turned Republican former president, master of spin, media-ready insult and creation of his own narrative.

Bragg’s legal argument is complicated, but it stems from a simple episode: In the days before the 2016 election, Trump’s personal attorney and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, paid $130,000 in hush money to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels. Prosecutors argue that Trump, who denies that he had sex with Daniels, then lied on 34 business records — 12 ledger entries, 11 invoices and 11 checks — to disguise his repayment of Cohen as legal fees.

On its own, falsifying those documents would be misdemeanors, relatively minor crimes. Bragg elevated each of the charges to felonies by arguing that they were committed to hide or further another crime — which, in an unusual move, he did not charge. He said he wasn’t required to specify that crime, but added that it might have been a violation of state or federal election law. What may further complicate the case is that it relies heavily on testimony from Cohen, a disbarred lawyer who served prison time after pleading guilty to violating campaign-finance laws, evading taxes, making false statements to a bank and lying to Congress.

After the indictment, a chorus of critics — some but not all on the right — questioned the legal reasoning, wisdom and winnability of the hush-money case. Today, many experts believe that Bragg’s legal strategy looks considerably stronger, validated by a federal judge who rebuffed Trump’s effort to delay or even kill the case by having it moved to federal court, and by the Manhattan judge presiding over the case, who in February officially greenlit Bragg’s premise by setting a trial date.

None of which means the case has ceased to be controversial. The furor lives on, primarily in the political space. Trump and his allies have branded the case a witch hunt, a selective prosecution brought by a Democratic district attorney in the pocket of George Soros, boogeyman of the right. Many Democrats, in turn, worry that Trump’s narrative of persecution is only fueling his presidential campaign, especially because this case of sexual peccadillo and faked paperwork might look frivolous next to his three other indictments, which cut closer to his presidency and the foundations of American democracy.

“We’re all kind of like, ‘I can’t believe Alvin is at the center of this,’” says Erin E. Murphy, a New York University law professor who is part of Bragg’s close-knit friend group from law school and was one of more than 70 friends, colleagues and legal and political experts interviewed for this article. She adds: “He’s just so not political. He’s like, not a hyperpartisan political person in any way, shape or form. So there’s just this dissonance.”

Certainly, Bragg, who is 50, has never seemed to concern himself much with appearances. His friends have long joked about his wearing rumpled suits or a Boy Scout outfit on a date. If he could have applied for this job instead of campaigning for it, they say, he would have. That’s what he did when he became a federal prosecutor and then a deputy New York attorney general, each move a step forward in a life devoted to a careful, verging on nerdy, practice of the law; to the commitment to service — a word he has often used — that his parents instilled in him when he was growing up on Strivers’ Row in Harlem.

Bragg himself has seemed almost sheepish about the Trump case, preferring to talk about tackling wage theft or creating a jail-diversion program. Just after he announced the indictment last spring, his office sent out its regular roundup of big cases. It listed the Trump indictment not first, not even second, but third — after the convictions of two killers. The office’s 2023 highlights list didn’t even mention Trump. Bragg declined to comment for this article, concerned about being accused of unethical behavior before the trial.

Yet if Bragg the district attorney has been largely quiet about the former president, a look back through his record shows that hasn’t always been the case. Bragg the candidate, in fact, was more than willing to talk up his legal bona fides in the matter of Trump. Bragg may lack the polish and presentation of a politician. His friends may insist that he’s not a politician. But for all his lawyerly reticence, inside his sometimes-ill-fitting suits is a man of unmistakable ambition who has hitched his aspirations to the pursuit of Donald J. Trump.

Bragg’s emergence as a public critic of Trump came at a time when he was relatively unknown outside New York legal and Harvard-alumni circles. And it came in an unusual venue: a video, posted in May 2019 by the progressive news outlet NowThis and hosted by the flamboyantly public Trump hater Robert De Niro. In the video, Bragg and 10 other former federal prosecutors said they believed that Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election had uncovered more than enough evidence to indict Trump. “This isn’t even a close case,” Bragg said.

Bragg was on a break from public service, teaching at New York Law School. But he was also just weeks from announcing his next move: his candidacy for Manhattan district attorney in an election still two years away.

The incumbent district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., had begun his own investigation of the president and his businesses. And even before Vance announced in March 2021 that he would not seek re-election, the race had become a referendum on who could best take on Trump. In a primary campaign of would-be Trump slayers, Bragg sold himself as the most experienced.

He talked about supervising the state investigation into the Trump Foundation as chief deputy attorney general in 2017 — a case that led to the charity’s closure. He said he knew how to prosecute fraud in the valuation of properties, one strand of Vance’s Trump investigation. Referring to Trump’s “criminal policies,” Bragg added, “He has embraced white nationalism, misconstrued data and engaged in cronyism, and the result has been a parade of horribles.” Bragg told The Wall Street Journal that he “certainly” had more experience with Trump “than most people in the world.” A rival Democrat’s spokeswoman complained that Bragg attacked Trump “for political advantage every chance he gets.”

Bragg also used Trump to contrast himself with Vance. The district attorney, he argued, had appeared soft on the rich and powerful, declining to prosecute two of Trump’s children several years earlier on accusations that they misled potential buyers in the struggling Trump SoHo condo-hotel. Vance had also met with one of Trump’s lawyers, Marc Kasowitz, and accepted his $32,000 campaign contribution just months after rejecting the Trump SoHo case. (Vance later returned the money.)

For Bragg, this was a break with lawyerly protocol — to be talking about a potential case before seeing all the facts, at the risk of appearing biased. Yet in this election cycle, and especially with Trump newly vulnerable after his 2020 loss, holding him to account seemed vital to being elected in Manhattan.

Bragg’s campaign was hardly all Trump. He also championed the sort of criminal-justice-reform issues — for example, ending long prison sentences for low-level street crimes — that had helped progressive prosecutors sweep into office nationwide. But he seemed to double down on Trump as the campaign went on, simplifying and exaggerating his record. “It is a fact that I have sued Trump over 100 times,” Bragg told The New York Times in April 2021, an often-repeated claim that would be published everywhere from CNN to the BBC. “I can’t change that fact, nor would I. That was important work.” Asked recently for documentation, a campaign spokesman, Richard Fife, sent links to more than 100 news releases. A review of these and court filings found 30 cases in which the New York attorney general’s office had sued Trump or his federal agencies during Bragg’s time there — nearly always alongside other states. (The office also joined 12 other ongoing lawsuits against the Trump administration, the analysis found.) As a top aide to the attorney general, Bragg could have supervised those cases, but taking personal credit seems a bit of a stretch.

The district attorney’s office referred questions about the lawsuits to Fife, who said Bragg’s comments were not written but made “in conversation.” (Bragg, in fact, did repeat the statement in a written candidate questionnaire.) “I will concede,” Fife said, “that our use of the word ‘suit’ isn’t as limited as your definition.”

In heavily Democratic Manhattan, primaries typically function as general elections. On Primary Day in June 2021, Bragg said on Twitter: “As Chief Deputy Attorney General of NY State, I oversaw a staff of 1200+ people delivering progressive change. I led the investigation into stop and frisk. I didn’t just sue Donald Trump and the Trump Foundation — I won.”

On Nov. 2, 2021, the night he trounced his Republican opponent, Bragg moved to the microphone at Harlem Tavern as supporters chanted: “Alvin! Alvin! Alvin!” His first public remarks were hardly memorable.

“Somewhere deep down inside, I think I always wanted a bar mitzvah,” said Bragg, who had long taught Sunday school at the nearby Abyssinian Baptist Church. “This is new for me, newly elected — I think I can say that now, right?” he asked the crowd, starting his speech. Then he paused, practically giddy, to interrupt himself: “Look, this is phenomenal.”

Bragg’s remarks made it clear that he saw his election as Manhattan’s first Black district attorney as the natural next chapter in the annals of his life. Walking to the tavern on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, Bragg told his supporters, his mind flipped back through a personal journey that began along this stretch of what neighborhood old-timers like himself still called Eighth Avenue: being dropped off at grade school by his parents; eventually taking the M10 bus there on his own; facing guns pointed at him by the police; graduating from high school. But that was not all. Bragg had one more memory to share.

“I had my first date with Jamila Ponton Bragg on 139th Street and Eighth Avenue,” he said. “And I was wearing a Boy Scout uniform, because I had just come from leading a troop at Abyssinian Baptist Church, and she still ate with me, and she married me!”

Bragg’s parents, Alvin Sr. and Sadie, raised him to move seamlessly between worlds. They attended church at Abyssinian, a stronghold of Black social-justice activism. But they also enrolled their only child as a kindergartner at the Trinity School, one of the city’s most exclusive private academies. Bragg, one of a handful of Black students, became the center of a tight-knit group of Trinity kids, friends who are still in his inner circle. “We always called him the mayor,” recalls John Scott, who met Bragg in middle school. “He was like the most gregarious and outgoing and charismatic guy, even back then.”

In a Trinity yearbook entry, Bragg quoted Aristotle, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the music producer Quincy Jones — and himself: “You and I are like two stalks of corn in a field of love … waiting for the harvest.” (It was apparently an inside joke.)

Asked by a journalist during the campaign if he was nerdy, Bragg said: “I think yes and no. I think nerdiness is a little bit context-based.” He paused and added: “I think in any broad sense, yes.” The Rev. Al Sharpton, who supported Bragg’s campaign and praised his indictment of Trump, described him this way: “He’s not the larger-than-life swagger figure of Harlem. He is the result of what those generations produced: a competent, efficient guy.”

Growing up, Bragg’s friends say, he didn’t make a big fuss about the three times he remembered the police pulling guns on him on the Harlem streets. Once, several police cars converged on a taxi carrying Bragg and four Black friends; the officers, guns drawn, ordered everyone out. They told them they “fit the description” of some boys who had just committed a crime nearby, then held them for a few minutes before letting them go, recalls Roald Richards, one of the friends. (During the campaign, whenever Bragg brought up his encounters with the police, he would also mention the three times criminals pulled guns on him or would praise the police for keeping the streets safe.)

Yet if Bragg swallowed those experiences as a teenager, he has also described them as fuel for his ambition. He was elected president of his high school senior class; his yearbook described an imaginary 20-year reunion in which Bragg was president of the United States. While he was at college, The Harvard Crimson highlighted his ability as president of the Black Students Association to defuse tension between warring student groups. The headline: “The Anointed One.” Bragg’s role: “Conciliator.” He became such good friends with Republicans that, years later, one would actually donate money to his campaign — despite the fact that said Republican, Harry Wilson, would later run for governor of New York. At Harvard Law School, Bragg joined the team that won the prestigious moot-court competition. Even that makes his path seem preordained: It was the Archibald Cox team, named for the Watergate prosecutor who investigated President Richard M. Nixon.

Bragg started out as a lawyer in private practice representing, among other clients, Native American tribal members who said they had been abused by the police. But he soon became a prosecutor at the state attorney general’s office, explaining later that he felt he could make more of a difference from the inside. After three years, he left to become a lawyer at the New York City Council. Three years after that, he joined the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan. After four years there, he returned for a second tour at the attorney general’s office. It became a pattern: Bragg never stayed long enough to build a deep record. He seemed in a rush to get somewhere.

But in offices where head-down self-advancement was the norm, Bragg amassed friends and allies. It’s all but impossible to find anyone who worked with him who has a negative thing to say. He walked around, often slightly disheveled, messenger bag dangling and tie askew, smiled big and asked, “How are you?” Several colleagues recalled being struck by how deliberately he tested the strengths and weaknesses of evidence. “In every regard, he was one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and meticulous,” says Joshua Gradinger, who worked under Bragg in the attorney general’s office. “I say that over and over again — meticulous.”

But as Bragg prepared to take office in 2022, a conflict was brewing: between his careful approach to the law and the promises he made during his political campaign.

Within days of becoming district attorney, Bragg announced his top policy priorities. From the recesses of his campaign website, he pulled a criminal-justice-reform manifesto outlining crimes that would no longer be prosecuted, including marijuana possession, trespassing and sex work. The Day 1 Memo, as it was called, also signaled that illegal gun possession would not mean jail time unless the gun was used in a violent crime.

The timing was less than ideal. During the pandemic, murders and shootings rose, and many New Yorkers seemed to believe that things were spiraling out of control. “Happy 2022, Criminals!” The New York Post blared, referring to Bragg as the “woke new Manhattan DA.”

Bragg’s ideas weren’t exactly radical. But his execution — announcing them as one of his first acts, in the biggest job of his life, without anticipating the backlash — made him look like a rookie, like someone who didn’t seem to fully grasp that he would be upsetting some of the very people he needed to do his job. The police commissioner rebuked him; police unions condemned him. Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney who had hired Bragg and then campaigned for him, was disappointed and frustrated by what he saw as an astonishingly clumsy rollout, according to people familiar with his thinking.

Bragg had another hangover from the campaign: the case of Tracy McCarter, a nurse accused of killing her husband. Vance had charged McCarter with second-degree murder in September 2020, even though she claimed self-defense and domestic abuse. Activists on social media had defended her. Bragg had weighed in. “I #StandWithTracy,” he tweeted on the day she was charged, using the hashtag pushed by McCarter’s backers. “Prosecuting a domestic violence survivor who acted in self-defense is unjust.”

Now, invested with the powers of the district attorney, Bragg had to decide whether he would indeed stand with McCarter. Pressing him to do so was a progressive group, Color of Change, whose political-action committee had endorsed him and pledged to spend more than $1 million supporting his campaign. It ultimately spent about $425,000, money that helped Bragg overcome his closest opponent’s last-minute rush of cash. (That financial link would become Republican ammunition: Within days of its Bragg endorsement, Color of Change received a $1 million donation from George Soros, the billionaire patron of liberal causes. After the Trump indictment, the former president and his allies pointed to it as evidence that Bragg was under Soros’s control.)

In November 2022, Bragg went into court himself — unusual for a sitting district attorney — to ask the judge to dismiss the McCarter case. “I understand the gravity of this decision,” he said, before lapsing into a jumble of legalese. Several days later, the judge, Diane Kiesel, dismissed the case but excoriated Bragg for what she called legal errors and potentially politically motivated decisions. The case, she wrote, “has reached the point where the public could perceive this dismissal as bought and paid for with campaign contributions and political capital.”

But in some ways, Bragg had started to get his footing, delivering on some of his campaign promises to take on the powerful and help the less fortunate. He prosecuted hate crimes against Asian Americans, exonerated a sixth defendant in the 1989 Central Park jogger case and pursued significantly fewer lower-level crimes than Vance had. He charged Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former political strategist, with money laundering and conspiracy for his role in a charity that skimmed from donations for a border wall, a case that has yet to go to trial. Bragg would also obtain indictments of two men with ties to a fellow Democrat, Mayor Eric Adams.

Still, Bragg seemed to be trying to thread the needle, looking for compromise as he had throughout his career. While he stopped demanding bail as often as Vance had, those decisions were often dictated by state bail reforms. His office also filed about 3,800 violent-felony cases in 2022, the most in 10 years, even as shootings and murders dropped, allowing Bragg to claim that his policies were working. But none of this would stop conservatives from grumbling that Bragg was a left-wing coddler of violent criminals, as a Republican prosecutor in Arizona would later do when she refused to extradite a murder suspect to New York.

By the end of his first year in office, Bragg had turned a corner. He had just won his biggest victory: convicting Trump’s company of tax fraud. Vance had filed the charges, but Bragg delivered on them. And finally, he was finding the way forward with Trump himself.

For more than two years, Cyrus Vance’s prosecutors had hunted for a winnable case against Trump. But while it wasn’t hard to find legally questionable behavior across Trump’s business empire, each possible case had a flaw.

The lawyers were intrigued by the hush-money case. Mark Pomerantz, a former federal prosecutor Vance had pulled out of retirement to pursue Trump, was among those who called it “the zombie case,” because it was alive, then dead, then alive again. Pomerantz thought the hush-money facts seemed incriminating, easy to explain to a jury. But he worried about persuading a judge that the misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records — for disguising the hush-money repayment as legal fees — could be elevated to felonies.

Pomerantz, who had led the criminal division in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, was drawn to another option: Trump’s exaggerations of his net worth on financial statements submitted to banks. Trump wasn’t just boasting, Pomerantz argued. He was committing crimes.

Weeks before his term ended in December 2021, Vance brought together a group of experienced lawyers to evaluate the net-worth case. The group included two prosecutors who worked on the Mueller investigation, but it did not include the incoming district attorney; Bragg was not even told about the meeting. Regardless, Vance emerged with a plan. He would push ahead.

When Bragg took office that January, he needed to decide quickly whether to sign on to the case; prosecutors were already presenting evidence to a grand jury. But quickly wasn’t in Bragg’s nature. By month’s end, a frustrated Pomerantz sent Bragg an email that he would later write was “blunt, perhaps too blunt.” He told the new district attorney that he needed to “respect our judgment,” noted that it was “virtually impossible” to meet with him about the Trump case and scolded Bragg, who was two decades younger, for looking at his phone during one of their few meetings. Pomerantz later wrote that he had wondered if Bragg “was in over his head.”

But Bragg remained skeptical, according to people familiar with his thinking. He believed that there was no evidence tying Trump directly to a financial fraud; without it, he worried, he would not be able to prove Trump’s criminal intent. And prosecutors wanted a tour guide — a cooperating witness who knew the ins and outs of the crime. Michael Cohen was extremely willing, having broken with Trump, but he lacked intimate knowledge of the Trump Organization’s finances.

There were more meetings, more emails — but Bragg refused to bring the case on Pomerantz’s timeline. So in late February, Pomerantz and another lead prosecutor on the case quit — in spectacular fashion. Pomerantz’s resignation letter described Bragg’s decision as “a grave failure of justice.” He then wrote a book called “People vs. Donald Trump” that might as well have been called “Pomerantz vs. Bragg.” Pomerantz wrote that the investigation turned into “the legal equivalent of a plane crash” and accused Bragg of “pilot error.”

Bragg, for his part, said little — even when Pomerantz’s resignation letter became public, even when many of his liberal supporters complained that he had dropped the ball on Trump and even when critics lumped this decision together with the Day 1 Memo as some kind of proof that he wasn’t up to the job. For all of Bragg’s campaign rhetoric, those who know him insisted that he would never have indicted Trump without reviewing every piece of evidence. Plus, Bragg did not feel bound by Vance’s view of the case — he was the district attorney now.

“He doesn’t get the luxury of saying, ‘Well, Cy Vance said it’s OK,’” says Kim Foxx, a Bragg friend who is the state’s attorney in Chicago. “His name is on the door. His face is on the wall. He owes it to the case. He owes it to the potential defendant to do his due diligence.”

To the world, it might have looked as if the Trump case were dead. Bragg was no longer talking about Trump publicly. But he and three top aides had begun meeting regularly on the eighth floor of the district attorney’s office, going back through all the documents from the net-worth case. The Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, had already been indicted in the tax-fraud case; now he might be persuaded to plead guilty and cooperate against Trump in this one. And he might, perhaps, become a witness about another matter: the hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels.

Bragg kept returning to that payment. This case had a far cleaner narrative than the net-worth case, with clear evidence of Trump’s involvement; he had personally signed nine checks repaying Cohen. And Cohen was the perfect tour guide: He had paid Daniels in the first place. By the summer of 2022, Bragg was confident that he could convince a court that these misdemeanors should be elevated to felonies. He added prosecutors to the Trump team. The “zombie case” was alive.

A payoff to a porn star might seem like a trivial matter on which to hinge a historic prosecution of a man who later tried to overturn an election. But in late February, the Supreme Court further delayed the federal prosecution of Trump on charges of plotting to do just that, agreeing to decide whether he has immunity for acts taken as president. Trial dates for the other two cases — the federal classified-documents case in Florida and the state election-interference case in Georgia — seem at best months away.

So the hush-money case it is. Some legal experts initially deemed it shaky, largely because Bragg failed to specify the underlying crime that Trump intended to commit. Though the crime of falsifying business records is nominally a misdemeanor, the Manhattan district attorney’s office almost always charges it as a felony. Still, the Trump case stands apart. The Times could identify only two other felony cases in Manhattan over the past decade in which defendants were indicted on charges of falsifying business records but no other crime.

In an opinion piece in The Times soon after the Trump indictment, Jed Shugerman, a law professor at Boston University, called the case a “disaster” and a “legal embarrassment.” Some lawyers predicted that it would be kicked up to federal court and buried in delays, largely because it was related to a federal-election campaign. Some wondered how internal records could prove intent to defraud.

But in the following months, Bragg beat back legal challenges. He detailed the crimes that Trump was trying to conceal — violations of state and federal election law and state tax law. When Trump’s lawyers tried to move the case to federal court, the judge there, Alvin K. Hellerstein, rebuffed them, saying that the fact that the alleged fraud happened in a federal election was “not a basis” to move the case. Then the New York judge overseeing the case, Juan M. Merchan, ruled that Bragg’s prosecutors had presented “legally sufficient evidence” for the grand jury to reasonably find that Trump intended to defraud voters and the government. Some initial skeptics have come around, even if they believe that the legal questions surrounding the case will probably re-emerge in appeals.

Accounting for the weight of the moment, Bragg has increasingly cast the case as an attempt to subvert the 2016 presidential election. “The case is not — the core of it’s not — money for sex,” Bragg said in a radio interview in December. “We would say it’s about conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then lying in New York business records to cover it up.”

Trump heads into the trial after a series of setbacks, both legal and financial. Relying on some of the same evidence that was pursued by Pomerantz, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, recently won a $454 million civil judgment against Trump for fraudulently inflating his net worth. He also owes an $83 million defamation award to the writer E. Jean Carroll. And in his pretrial rulings, Merchan has slapped Trump with a gag order and strictly circumscribed the arguments his lawyers will be allowed to make. Defense lawyers have signaled that their case will most likely focus on attacking Michael Cohen as a serial liar who cannot be trusted and arguing that prosecutors have little evidence of Trump’s intent to commit a crime.

If Trump is convicted, he faces limited personal jeopardy, at least in the near term; any penalty — a maximum of four years in prison — would probably be deferred by his almost-certain appeal. The far-larger questions as the trial and the Trump-Biden rematch converge are about political jeopardy, or political advantage. Republican strategists believe, and some of their Democratic counterparts fret, that an acquittal or a hung jury will energize Trump, while he could more convincingly write off a conviction than with the other cases. “I can’t imagine anything easier to paint as a partisan witch hunt,” says Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster.

Even so, some Democrats argue that wall-to-wall coverage of the trial will remind voters on the fence — like the moderate Republicans Trump needs to win — that he has been accused of having sex with a porn star while his wife cared for their infant son and then covering it up to win a presidential election. “The world’s going to stop for this,” says James Carville, the longtime Democratic strategist. “I mean, the first criminal trial ever of a president? I think if anything, the significance of this event is not yet fully appreciated.”

On the morning of Feb. 15, Bragg was back in the dingy courtroom where Trump was first arraigned. The district attorney, this time wearing a well-fitted gray suit, sat on a hard wooden bench in the second row, behind the team of prosecutors he had assembled. Walkie-talkies crackled, signaling the arrival of the former president. In a dirty hallway crammed with Secret Service agents, Trump spoke to television cameras. He said his lawyers would ask to delay the case — then he walked in, wearing a slightly rumpled navy suit and a screaming red tie.

In the courtroom, an unusually subdued Trump stared at the ceiling, arms at his sides. But once the trial date was set, Bragg didn’t seem to focus on Trump or on discussions about jury selection and trial exhibits. He bent over the judge’s decision declining to dismiss the case, reading it slowly, carefully. After the hearing, he released a brief statement, pronouncing himself “pleased.” Pleased . His spokeswoman confessed later that it was a struggle to get him to say even that.

Susan Beachy and Julie Tate contributed research.

Read by Emily Woo Zeller

Narration produced by Emma Kehlbeck and Krish Seenivasan

Engineered by David Mason

Kim Barker is a Times reporter writing in-depth stories about national issues. More about Kim Barker

Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney's office, state criminal courts in Manhattan and New York City's jails. More about Jonah E. Bromwich

Michael Rothfeld is an investigative reporter in New York, writing in-depth stories focused on the city’s government, business and personalities. More about Michael Rothfeld

Our Coverage of the Trump Hush-Money Case

The manhattan district attorney has filed charges against former president donald trump over a hush-money payment to a porn star on the eve of the 2016 election..

Taking the Case to Trial: Trump is all but certain to become the first former U.S. president to stand trial on criminal charges after a judge denied his effort to delay the proceeding and confirmed it will begin on April 15 .

Implications for Trump: As the case goes to trial, the former president’s inner circle sees a silver lining in the timing. But Trump wouldn’t be able to pardon himself should he become president again as he could if found guilty in the federal cases against him.

Michael Cohen: Trump’s former fixer was not an essential witness in the former president’s civil fraud trial in New York that concluded in January. But he will be when he takes the stand in the hush-money case .

Stormy Daniels: The chain of events flowing from a 2006 encounter that the adult film star said she had with Trump has led to the brink of a historic trial. Here's a look inside the hush-money payout .

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Music Reviews

Beyoncé's 'cowboy carter' is a portrait of the artist getting joyously weird.

Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter has ignited discourse about the place of Black musicians in country music. But it's also evidence of its creator's desire to break genre walls by following her most eccentric impulses. Mason Poole/Courtesy of the artist hide caption

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After two months of anticipation, Cowboy Carter has been out in the world for nearly a fortnight, and the discourse is thick as sawdust on a honky-tonk floor. Beyoncé's spangled opus, as lengthy and florid as a Sergio Leone classic — it really could have been called The Good, the Bey and the Ugly -- has generated more think pieces than any pop phenomenon since her friendly rival Taylor's Eras tour.

I've kept track of the coverage of Cowboy Carter and it's, well, something. Actually it's everything, ranging from paeans to (not too many) pans . Not weighing in hasn't been an option for most music writers, who have spilled tons of ink documenting the album's backstory, tracing its references, and examining its work of legacy building. What could I add to the discourse? Well, this: Whether it's considered a champion's walk, an overlong stumble, a powerful political gesture or a highly personal cri de couer — one thing Cowboy Carter is, undeniably even if no one has said it, is weird. And that's a wonderful thing.

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On 'cowboy carter,' beyoncé's country is as broad as the public she serves.

Not that Beyoncé herself would ever admit to her own eccentricity. She's declared herself a diligent student of the genre she sought to revise, and many of the touchstones on this massive grab bag of ballads and bangers check the boxes of cultural intervention. She features Dolly and Willie; shows us her boots, brand-name jeans and whiskey bottle; includes a murder ballad and her perspective on that ultimate country emblem, the American flag. (She sees it as red: blood, Alabama clay, indigenous people.)

Her inclusion of the undersung Black Grand Ole Opry pioneer Linda Martell as a collaborator nods to efforts to rectify historical omissions that have been going on in and around Nashville for years — shoutout to the Black Opry crew, to artist and radio host Rissi Palmer and to Martell's granddaughter, who continues to crowd-fund a documentary that Beyoncé really should just finance.

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But the way she assembles these hardly unique elements is startling. Sidestepping either a conventional foray into country's traditional sounds or a risk-averse pop approach that would just use those elements as window-dressing, she and her dozens of collaborators assemble a cosmic omnibus of reference points while drilling down on her long-standing obsessions. While it's correct to call this album an epic and a strong political statement, it's an idiosyncratic one, more akin to Jim Jarmusch's off-kilter visions of American heritage — especially Mystery Train -- than, say, Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon .

It may seem off to identify eccentricity in a project that includes radio-ready Miley Cyrus and Post Malone collabs, and which was quickly endorsed by none other than the Vice President. Yet the first thing I thought of when I sat down to listen to Cowboy Carter was an album from 1967 that's beloved by many rock cognoscenti for its very peculiarness. Van Dyke Parks 's Song Cycle was the first solo album by the noted composer, arranger and producer. It is a shambling, sunnily psychedelic portrait of California living from the perspective of a transplanted white East Coaster with Southern roots. (Parks was born in Mississippi but grew up in Princeton singing in a boys' choir.)

Rich with strings and gorgeous melodies and rife with punnily poetical lines like, "Nowadays a Yankee dread not take his time to wend to sea" in a song about Parks's own experience trying to make it within the L.A. music biz hustle, no less, Song Cycle features Parks's birdlike warble, and by birdlike, I don't mean Beyoncé's operatic forays on new songs like "DAUGHTER" or "FLAMENCO," but Tweety Bird or the Peanuts ' Woodstock. Parks made the unfinished psychedelic masterpiece Smile with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and later worked with 21st-century visionaries Joanna Newsom and Gaby Moreno, among others. But Song Cycle is his strange baby. Though it's a rich work that offers real insight into the melting late 1960s American West Coast dream, Song Cycle is not for everyone. Parks experimented joyfully with song structure, sound effects and lyricism, painting a floating world that requires time and sympathy to comprehend.

Cowboy Carter sounds absolutely nothing like Song Cycle , yet I thought about the latter as I sunk into the non-linear, fragmentary experience of listening to it. I appreciate how Beyoncé sticks to her guns throughout, just as Parks maintained his whimsicality and dreaminess. Stacked harmonies do here what strings do on Song Cycle , lending grandeur to the opening "American Requiem" and tenderness to the ballads "MY ROSE" and "FLAMENCO" (the latter pairs them artfully with Andalusian hand-claps); yet those vocals also set a kind of Broadway stage for the songs, rendering them winsomely surreal. The album's employment of banjo and pedal steel signify country, sure, but they're used in unusual ways, as Parks uses accordion and balalaika. The distortions are highly individualistic, nothing like what current country sounds like. (Exception: that Post Malone duet, "LEVII'S JEANS.") Same with the roots references. The interlude "OH LOUISIANA" speeds up a Chuck Berry vocal to turn that rock and roll founder into helium. On the tour de force Tina Turner tribute "YA YA," Beyoncé begins with a spoken exchange with her background singers that calls back to her campy turn in Austin Powers in Goldmember as well as to Southern rap's most glorious weirdo breakthrough, Outkast's "Hey Ya!" Sure, this is historical work, but it's hardly textbook.

These tracks stand alongside others in a sprawl of concepts, tempos and tones until Cowboy Carter turns into a full-on megamix, its final four tracks returning to the dance party of Renaissance , abruptly concluded with a literal showstopper, the Broadway-ready "AMEN." The album is immersive, but it's a jerky, bucking rodeo ride, not a narrative that lends itself to easy absorption. And through it all Beyoncé bends country and blues tropes — those two genres are inseparable, something Cowboy Carter acknowledges — to the themes she can never abandon: the perils of attempted monogamy, the joy and terror involved in mothering and her own determination to be great, an ambition that she views as a responsibility more than a privilege.

Concept albums can be relatively straightforward, like Willie Nelson's classic Red Headed Stranger , but often they do come out ornate and leaky as their makers dump all of their ideas within the frame. Beyoncé nods sonically to a few that came after Song Cycle . At certain points, Sly and the Family Stone's murky funk on There's a Riot Goin' On comes to mind. Michael Jackson never made a full-on concept album, but that tarnished legend requires mention because Beyoncé's massive ambition rivals his more than anyone's. (Maybe Madonna's; she did make a concept record, Erotica . Or that soundtrack-maker Prince's.)

More recent touchstones include the high-concept forays of Janelle Monaé, whose " Tightrope " seems as much a touchstone for "YA YA" as does Tina Turner's shimmy, and the efforts of two of her collaborators on Cowboy Carter . Raphael Saadiq, who co-produced several tracks, released a similarly massive and emotionally affecting concept album , Jimmy Lee , in 2019. And the Virginia-born multihyphenate Shaboozie, a visionary character whom Beyoncé has apparently recognized as a kindred soul, paid tribute to the landscapes and culture of his native state on his own 2022 disquisition on the same themes as Cowboy Carter . Its title? Cowboys Live Forever, Outlaws Never Die .

Beyoncé is getting played on country radio. Could her success help other Black women?

When I associate Cowboy Carter with these equally adventurous and strange concept albums and the outsiders who made them, I don't mean to reduce the impact of her work or her centrality as an era-defining artist. Instead, I'm trying to free this fun and unfettered music from the burden of predefined significance. Beyoncé has, by her own will as well as her fans's needs, become what Doreen St. Felix calls an "übermatriarch," not only a biological mother but the nurturing, burdened mother of all of her faithful — and of Black America, a role she inherited and claimed from the equally eccentric and more reluctantly ennobled Aretha Franklin. The seriousness of her responsibilities has earned her a lot: millions nearing billions of dollars, a place among heads of state and a fan base that strikes fear in the hearts of naysayers. But for an artist, such success ultimately confines. Only a few have been able to remain playful and light-footed as their public images have hardened into marble.

Two such artists, as it happens, are ones Beyoncé directly takes on in Cowboy Carter : The Beatles, whose members never stopped releasing humorous and even nonsense songs alongside their wedding-and-funeral ballads and politicized anthems; and Dolly Parton, the most agile pop star of all, who's crossed into nearly every category that's interested her with her own birdlike laugh and dimpled smile. Dolly herself has deep and strange predilections: her many songs about dead children, for example, or her way of turning sexuality cartoonish not only as comic relief, but as a weapon. It's her oddball side as well as her musical genius that's allowed her to slip through so many doors.

Beyoncé did not create Cowboy Carter to honor white artists like Parton, but she made a wise decision by invoking her as a partner and a patron saint. In the spoken interlude that precedes Beyoncé's rewrite of her classic "Jolene," Parton refers to Beyoncé's famous line about a white woman's allure for her Black husband, "Becky with the good hair," as "that hussy with the good hair." She drawls out the insult, though, as if she's in the middle of a Hee Haw skit: huzzzzy . It's a goofy, enjoyably destabilizing moment — an eccentric gesture that reminds us that as serious as music can be, it's most powerful when its subversions are also fun.

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Imploding the Mirage Tour
The Imploding the Mirage Tour is the ongoing sixth major concert tour by American rock band The Killers. The tour supports their sixth and seventh studio albums Imploding the Mirage (2020) and Pressure Machine (2021). The tour began at the Terminal 5 in New York City on August 19, 2021, and ended at Interlagos Circuit in Sao Paulo on December 2 ...
The Killers Announce 2022 Tour Dates
The Killers have revealed expansive 2022 touring plans. The news followed their reveal that they will release their new seventh studio album, Pressure Machine, next month (8/13/21).The group had previously released their album Imploding the Mirage just last year. Ahead of their 2022 trek, The Killers have plans to perform at music festivals this year like Firefly and Sandjam Festival.
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The Killers 2022 Tour Dates. Aug. 19 - Vancouver, British Columbia @Rogers Arena Aug. 20 - Seattle, Wash. @ Climate Pledge Arena Aug. 21 - Portland, Ore. @ Moda Center
The Killers Announce New Album, Plot 2022 Tour
The LP is due out on August 13 via Island Records. The album was co-produced by the band, Shawn Everett, and Jonathan Rado (of Foxygen), all of whom worked together on The Killers' critically-acclaimed album Imploding The Mirage, released last year. The band has also announced a 2022 tour to support the album, and their previous release that ...
The Killers announce new album 'Pressure Machine' and 2022 tour w
The Killers — 2022 Tour Dates Fri August 19, 2022 Vancouver BC Rogers Arena Sat August 20, 2022 Seattle WA Climate Pledge Arena Sun August 21, 2022 Portland OR Moda Center Tues August 23, 2022 ...
The Killers announce massive Australasian Tour for 2022
Frontier Touring are thrilled to welcome The Killers back to Australia and New Zealand for a massive nine-date mix of arena and outdoor shows on their Imploding The Mirage Tour 2022 in November-December. Originally announced in 2020 when COVID first halted worldwide touring, this will be The Killers' first time back on our shores since their 2018 Australasian tour which included ten ...
Jul 21 The Killers Announce 2022 North American Tour
On the heels of the announcement that they'll be releasing their seventh studio album, The Killers have announced that they will be returning to the road next year for a full-fledged North American tour. The band will be supported on each date by Johnny Marr. The extensive U.S. tour is slated to kick off on August 19th, 2022 in Vancouver, BC, and will wrap up October 8th, 2022 in Detroit, MI.
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The Killers had been scheduled to perform at the downtown Denver arena in August 2020, but that show was canceled due to the pandemic. Tickets for the 2022 "Imploding Mirage Tour" concert range ...
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Wednesday 08:00 PMWed 8:00 PM 8/14/24, 8:00 PM. Las Vegas, NV The Colosseum at Caesars Palace The Killers: Live in Las Vegas - Celebrating 20 Years of Hot Fuss. Find tickets 8/14/24, 8:00 PM. 8/16/24. Aug. 16. Friday 08:00 PMFri 8:00 PM 8/16/24, 8:00 PM. Las Vegas, NV The Colosseum at Caesars Palace The Killers: Live in Las Vegas - Celebrating ...
The Killers
The Killers will be heading back to the road to celebrate both Pressure Machine and Imploding The Mirage, along with their much-loved catalog of global hits, in 2022.. Tickets go on sale on Friday, July 23rd, at 10 am local time via the band's website or on Ticketmaster.com.. The Killers will release their seventh studio album, entitled Pressure Machine, on Island Records on August 13, 2021.
The Killers announce 2022 Australia and New Zealand tour
The Killers' 2022 Australia and New Zealand tour dates are: NOVEMBER. 21 - Auckland, Spark Arena. 25 - Christchurch, Christchurch Arena. 29 - Brisbane, Brisbane Entertainment Centre ...
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Sat 25 May 2024 LIDO CONNECT Bangkok, Thailand. JP Saxe. Mon 13 May 2024 The Triffid Brisbane, QLD, Australia. Love Fame Tragedy. Tue 14 May 2024 O2 Institute2 Birmingham Birmingham, UK. Twin Atlantic. Fri 26 Jul 2024 Belladrum Tartan Hart Festival 2024 Inverness, UK. Welshly Arms. Tue 04 Jun 2024 JunkYard Dortmund, Germany.
The Killers announce 2022 New Zealand tour
The Killers will tour our shores as part of their 2022 Imploding The Mirage World Tour, which will see the band playing headline shows and festivals across the globe in celebration of their sixth album, the ARIA #1 Imploding The Mirage.. Earlier this year, while touring was still on hold due to the ongoing pandemic, The Killers released their seventh studio album, the quieter, character-study ...
The Killers announce outdoor shows on huge 2022 Australia tour
The Killers will tour our shores as part of their 2022 Imploding The Mirage World Tour, which will see the band playing headline shows and festivals across the globe in celebration of their sixth album, the ARIA #1 Imploding The Mirage.. Earlier this year, while touring was still on hold due to the ongoing pandemic, The Killers released their seventh studio album, the quieter, character-study ...
The Killers
Sep 14, 2022. When the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the promotional run and worldwide tour for The Killers' critically-acclaimed 2020 album Imploding the Mirage," "everything came to this grinding halt," says frontman Brandon Flowers."And it was the first time in a long time for me that I was faced with silence."
The Killers announce new album Pressure Machine, 2022 North American tour
The Killers plan to tour behind both Imploding the Mirage and Pressure Machine starting in 2022. To coincide with today's album announcement, they've revealed dates for a lengthy North American tour running from August to October. Tickets for these dates go on sale Friday, July 23rd at 10:00 a.m. local time via Ticketmaster.
Live Review: The Killers
Source: Harry Craig. his is a super-spreader event," Brandon Flowers declared just before ' Jenny Was a Friend of Mine ', "we're spreading peace, love and rock and roll" - a not-so-subtle nod to the fact that COVID has postponed this tour three times. 921 days of waiting for the mirage to be imploded, and The Killers finally had ...
The Killers tour dates 2023
The Killers Full Tour Schedule 2023 & 2024, Tour Dates & Concerts - Songkick. The Killers tour dates 2023. The Killers is currently touring across 1 country and has 1 upcoming concert. The final concert of the tour will be at Autódromo José Carlos Pace (Interlagos) in São Paulo.
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The Battle Born World Tour is the fourth major concert tour by American rock band The Killers, in support of their fourth studio album Battle Born, which was released in September 2012. The tour included the band's biggest show to date at Wembley Stadium. It also saw them visit new territories including Russia, Ukraine, China and South East ...
The Killers Announce 'Hot Fuss' Anniversary Residency in Las Vegas
The Killers Hot Fuss 20th Anniversary tour dates: Aug 14 - Las Vegas, NV @ The Colosseum at Caesars Palace. Aug 16 - Las Vegas, NV @ The Colosseum at Caesars Palace. Aug 17 - Las Vegas, NV ...
The Killers
Stay up-to-date on new Killers music, videos, news, tour dates, and more on Consequence. Consequence is your go-to source for Killers album reviews, concert reviews and more. ... the group began a world tour, performing on every continent and headlining Lollapalooza and Coachella. Following their tour, the band announced that they would take a ...
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Harlem Globetrotters 2024 World Tour presented by Jersey Mike's Subs
Harlem Globetrotters 2024 World Tour presented by Jersey Mike's Subs
Beyoncé's 'Cowboy Carter' is a portrait of the artist getting joyously
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