In a rather mundane, humdrum collection of 18 songs, The Killers closed T-Mobile’s stage on the third day of Lollapalooza. To the naked eye, repetitive tracks and a lack of interest from the crowd plagued the field. Sparkling moments, however, prevailed within the set, including a fan getting invited onstage.
The Killers started their set with “Somebody Told Me,” a song the spacious crowd danced to. The energy increase was not uniform throughout the masses — only the select center seemed to enjoy the entirety of the rock set — and the audience size seemed to only shrink throughout the set time.
“When You Were Young” was another semi-successful attempt at enthralling the audience with a heavy synthesizer sound. Exciting for a moment — and to some more than others — the song ended as quickly as it started.
The Killers performed other of their hits, “Smile Like You Mean It,” “Shot at the Night” and “boy.” They performed a nondifferentiable slew of similar sounding lyrics and sound. Some songs only had a notable start due to Brandon Flowers, the lead singer and self-deemed host of the night, introducing it to the crowd.
A peak of the night, however, was when Oscar, a fan chosen at random to play the drums for the band’s tenth song of the evening, joined The Killers onstage. The Chicago native fell silent for the first few seconds of “For Reasons Unknown” but was embraced with applause from the crowd as he found footing.
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“Oscar! Oscar! Oscar!” The crowd cheered as he continued. Even more noise covered the field as Oscar finished his section of the set.
Another memorable moment at the concert was when fans used their phones to light the field up in response to Flowers requesting the audience to do so. Beautiful sight to see, but because he asked, the audience’s gesture felt forced and changed the atmosphere of the night.
The Killers hit “Read My Mind” and “Caution” to continue the rather listless set, until the final song “All These Things That I’ve Done” drew what seemed to be the end of the night.
Finally, their stage went dark and audience members were confused: How had they not played the song they were most famous for?
“One more song! One more song!” The crowd cheered, asking for “Mr. Brightside.”
Cornily enough, after over three minutes of anticipation, an electric guitar reverberated again through surrounding speakers. To the audience’s dismay, however, it was not their song of heed.
“Human” was a second-best, up-there song that satiated the needs of the guests. They met the first track of the two encore numbers with enthusiasm.
Then, guitarists hinted at the introduction of “Mr. Brightside.” Slowly the beat started picking up, but it was obviously not the right speed or tempo; something was off.
At the end of the song, the crowd clapped, but it wasn’t an applause that signaled a strong or satisfied audience. It was a good thing the band restarted the introduction, and eventually the entire song, to “Mr. Brightside.”
Still, the entire encore set was completely unnecessary, adding nothing special except a couple minutes of questioning why this band was headlining Lollapalooza. The two encore numbers could have easily been incorporated into the main feature and saved the crowd a wait.
Production of the show felt like a letdown from the “Mr. Brightside” band — especially when compared to previous T-Mobile stage closing artist, SZA. And considering Chappell Roan probably doubled the crowd singing at the same location, the entire set begged the question: “Why are The Killers headlining?”
