The first thing you notice about the Las Vegas band’s superb new album is that the sharp melodic sensibility that ran through Hot Fuss, but was frustratingly absent from Sam’s Town, is back. Brandon Flowers spent much of that second studio album stepping outside the tramlines, as it were, of his vocal parts, robbing the band’s songs of their most notable strength, that of communicative clarity. Sam’s Town was also hampered by a sort of anxious self-consciousness; this, rather than any supposed Springsteen fixations, was its great failing. Day & Age finds the front man back in contention, with a set of melodies that, indebted though they may be (no surprise there) to idols such as Bowie, Pet Shop Boys and Roxy Music, simply trounce the competition for immediacy and emotional force. With Stuart Price at the controls, the band reconnect with the pop perfection with which Hot Fuss seduced fans. Human (weird grammar aside), Spaceman, Neon Tiger, This Is Your Life, Dustland Fairytale and, above all, the musically blowsy but melodically bleak bossa nova of I Can’t Stay (with its deadly passing note in the chorus’s vocal harmony) command the upper ground of pop. Far below them, to the left, the preposterous posturings of Razorlight; to the right, Coldplay’s pallid and po-faced warbling. On Day & Age, the Killers retake the summit.

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