Day & Age

Partly written on the road during the Sam's Town tour, with demos traded over the internet, and finished at the band's Battle Born Studios in Las Vegas, then mixed at Olympic Studios and mastered at Metropolis in London. Stuart Price had first met the band about producing tracks for Sawdust and made a demo of Human instead. Tommy Marth plays saxophone and Daniel de los Reyes percussion. Paul Normansell painted the cover, which Rolling Stone readers voted the best of 2008, and his portraits of the band appear on the single sleeves.

Flowers said the record leaned a little more toward pop. Pitchfork called it the band's spitball album and Q counted four great songs and four duds, while PopMatters found it their most consistent and confident album so far, and Stereogum concluded that they were a singles band and that this was probably enough. It entered at one in Britain and six in America.