Wonderful Wonderful

Flowers said he and Keuning were swapping ideas for the record in May 2015, and the four members reconvened that October. They began at Battle Born Studios and rented houses in Joshua Tree National Park and San Diego, and tried Ryan Tedder and other producers in Los Angeles before settling on Jacknife Lee, whom Bono had recommended. Lee worked with them from September 2016 to May 2017 at his home studio in Topanga and at National SouthWestern Recording in Las Vegas, with extra production from Erol Alkan on The Man and Stuart Price on Out of My Mind.

Stoermer stopped touring in May 2016 but kept working on the record and shaped many of the tracks with Flowers, and Keuning announced his own touring hiatus in August 2017. Mark Knopfler plays guitar on Have All the Songs Been Written?, a title that began as the subject line of an email Flowers sent Bono during writer's block. Flowers said the title Wonderful Wonderful came to him in the desert as he watched a storm approach. Alex Cameron contributed lyrics, including to Run for Cover. Rut was inspired by his wife Tana's struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder, and Tyson vs Douglas by the 1990 boxing match and samples the HBO commentary. The Man draws on Kool & the Gang's Spirit of the Boogie, and Vannucci based its drums on Siouxsie and the Banshees' Peek-a-Boo. Anton Corbijn took the photography.

It was the first Killers album to top the Billboard 200, with 118,000 units in its first week, and with 51,756 first-week copies in Britain it made the Killers the first international act to chart its first five studio albums at number one there. Metacritic averaged 71 from 25 reviews. Barry Nicolson gave it four stars in NME and called it the band's best album since Sam's Town. Pitchfork's review carried the line "With the Killers, greatness and ridiculousness go hand in hand."