Crossfire

Flowers doing the synth-rock thing with so much confidence that you forget he’s singing about relationships or whatever, just locked into that groove. It’s the kind of song that works best blasting in a car at night, when you’re alone and the road’s empty and nothing else matters. There’s something about the production—all those bright, crystalline synths cutting through the mix—that makes it feel both present and like it’s from some imagined 80s you never actually lived through. I remember hearing it years later and being struck by how much of his solo work was about finding permission to just sound like this, without the weight of a band behind him. Not as studied as The Killers, not as ambitious. Just happy to be big and dumb and pretty.