Hitmen

About an hour before showtime, Brandon Flowers, the singer and keyboardist of Las Vegas Eighties revivalists the Killers, crouches in front of a full-length mirror to check his makeup. The band is playing New York's Central Park — after selling 2 million copies of its debut, Hot Fuss, the Killers have landed the opening-night slot of the park's summer concert series — and Flowers is in his dressing room. It's a perfect June night. "We all wish we were somewhere else," Flowers admitted earlier, gazing longingly at a tree on the other side of the fenced-in backstage area. "But we're trapped here. What we're doing now is paying our dues."

And carefully applying eye shadow with a miniature pad — left eye first, then right. The mascara wand comes out next, followed by some glittery blush for the cheeks. Flowers' hair is already flawlessly mussed, as if by a robot hand. On a nearby table, several deli platters remain covered in plastic, as they will for the rest of the evening. "I used to wear a lot more glitter," Flowers says. "Now everyone's wearing makeup. I mean, Green Day? Come on. At least leave us the makeup."

Outside, Jay-Z has just arrived on a bicycle. Making politic appearances are part of his new job as president of Def Jam Recordings, and the Killers — signed to Island, Def Jam's sister label at the Universal Music Group — are the best-selling new rock band of the past year. "I think they take what's old and make it sound new again," Jay-Z says. "Do you know what I mean? I don't want to sound like some weirdo artist. But that's what they're doing." He claps my arm excitedly. "My favorite part of their song is when they repeat, 'It was only a kiss! It was only a kiss!' But that's everyone's favorite part, right?"

The song to which Jigga refers is "Mr. Brightside," the Killers' catchy second single, which, even fans must admit, owes much of its catchiness to the fact that they have heard the song before, when Blondie wrote it and it was called "Dreaming." The most hyped rock bands of the past few years, from the White Stripes to Franz Ferdinand to the Strokes, wear their influences on their sleeves, but the Killers — hailing from Vegas, after all, home of the tribute band — sample the songs of their youth as openly and enthusiastically as Puffy in his Bad Boy prime. The big hook of their first single, "Somebody Told Me," was the tongue-twisting, gender-bending chorus ("Well, somebody told me/You had a boyfriend/Who looked like a girlfriend/ That I had in February of last year"), which is, in structure and content, a lift from the chorus of the old Blur song "Girls and Boys" ("Girls who are boys/Who like boys to be girls/Who do boys like they're girls"). Elsewhere on Hot Fuss, you'll hear snatches of David Bowie, Duran Duran, Depeche Mode and U2, all delivered with enough verve to sound new again to younger fans and like a guilty pleasure to everyone else.

Flowers, who is twenty-four, understands as much as anyone how popular music relentlessly borrows from the past. Example: A few nights earlier, after a gig in Toronto, he got word that Paul Anka was dining in a Greek restaurant down the street. It's hard to imagine any rock star under fifty thinking, "Paul fucking Anka? I need to meet this guy." But that is exactly what Flowers did, because, as he explains, Anka wrote "My Way," and as a teenager living in rural Utah, Flowers was obsessed with Frank Sinatra's version of the song. It made him want to move to the Vegas Strip, conjuring Rat Pack visions of golf at exclusive country clubs and shows at the Copacabana. Around the same time, he heard Bowie's Hunky Dory and decided he wanted to be a musician. That album contains the song "Life on Mars?" — which, Flowers points out, has the same chord changes as "My Way." He sings lines from both songs to prove his point, then says, "Without Paul Anka, there would be no Killers." He pauses, then adds, "I didn't tell him that." Pausing again, he smiles, then continues: "He didn't know who we were. His daughters liked us, though."