Somebody Told Me

"Somebody Told Me" is a heat-vision blur of a song — built on a riff that shimmies rather than stomps, all angular post-punk energy processed through a glam-rock sensibility. The Killers here are operating in full New Wave homage mode, the production shiny and slightly synthetic, drums snapping with mechanical precision, bass cutting through the mix with a funk that the genre doesn't always allow. Flowers' voice is in performance mode, slightly swaggering, the syllables clipped and shaped for maximum attack. The lyric circles around a romantic tangle relayed through secondhand information, the kind of social drama that feels enormous at close range and almost farcical from a distance — the song captures both registers simultaneously. It's playful in a way "Mr. Brightside" never quite is, the anxiety transmuted into something more like wit. Released on Hot Fuss in 2004, it represented a reclaiming of American rock's capacity for theatrical pop energy — something that had been largely ceded to British acts for a decade. It belongs at the beginning of a night when everything is still possible, when the lights are low and something is about to happen, or in a gym when energy needs to come from somewhere.