It’s easy to love a thing that everyone else loves. In the music world, there is something thrilling about the communion that comes with shared adoration: about falling head over heels for something that resonates with a lot of other people at the same time as it resonates with you, or of getting the affirmation that comes from seeing all your friends and family and acquaintances fall in love with an album or artist you already adored. It’s far harder to stand your ground when you love something that everyone else says is dogshit. It’s difficult to keep carrying the torch for an album when even the artist who made it has come to view it as sub-par.

I bring all of this up because this weekend marks 10 years since The Killers released Battle Born, their fourth album and an LP that just about everyone – frontman Brandon Flowers included – is convinced is mediocre or downright bad. They’re all wrong: This album fucking rules. It has always ruled, and it will always rule, and it is the perfect bridge between The Killers that were and The Killers that are today. There have been times, over the years, where I would have called it the band’s best album. (I believe that my review of the album for AbsolutePunk.net, still listed as the most positive write-up the album got on Metacritic, made precisely that claim.) From the vantage point of 2022, following two game-changing, band-redefining albums from The Killers in 2020 and 2021, I’m not even sure what my favorite Killers album is anymore. Best or not, though, Battle Born deserves more credit than it got in 2012, and I’m here to make the case for it – even if no one else will.