Welcome back: The Killers return home tonight

Ronnie Vannucci Jr.’s palms may be a little sweatier than usual tonight.

“It’s scary for us sometimes to sort of unleash a new song to an audience,” The Killers drummer acknowledges. “You never know how it’s going to go. It’s very sobering sometimes.”

Perhaps those butterflies will be fluttering in his belly a bit this evening, then, when the band returns home to headline T-Mobile Arena.

The Killers will air at least one tune here for the first time in coming-of-age anthem “Boy,” which dropped earlier this month.

And there’s plenty of fresh material where that came from: The Killers are currently on their first full U.S. tour in support of their two most recent albums, 2020’s kaleidoscopic “Imploding the Mirage” and last year’s gritty, heartfelt “Pressure Machine.”

In addition to new songs, expect new versions of old songs.

“I think we’re at that point where we have recognized a need for a certain emotional arc within a set list, and even within songs themselves,” Vannucci explains. “We’ll do different live versions of songs, we’ll put them together with another older song sometimes and we’ll put breaks in there, we’ll sort augment them and trim and curate them to fit a live scenario.

“A lot of times we’ll speed them up,” he continues. “Actually, we slow down one of our old songs — we slow down ‘Bling’ to make it a little more groovy. That kind of thing sometimes just takes years to do. It’s also fun for us to mess with the songs a little bit, not play them verbatim. It helps us get by with playing a song for the 7,000th time.”

Fans of seminal alt-rockers The Smiths are advised to get to the venue early: the band’s former guitarist Johnny Marr opens the show. And as if that wasn’t enough, he’s been joining The Killers during their encore to cover The Smiths’ “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before.”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @JasonBracelin @jbracelin76 on Instagram.