“Crossfire” by Brandon Flowers

"Crossfire" was Brandon Flowers' first single away from the Killers, the song that launched his 2010 solo debut Flamingo, and it's a big, windswept pop-rock ballad with a chorus built for open-top driving. Flowers wrote it alone and Brendan O'Brien produced it. It leaked online in June before Zane Lowe gave it a proper premiere on BBC Radio 1, and the video, starring Charlize Theron, followed in July.

British radio couldn't get enough: it sat on the A-lists at both Radio 1 and Radio 2, and in late August Flowers was the most-played artist on the BBC with just one song to his name. It topped the NME chart for several weeks, even though the critics were split. A 10-inch picture disc backed it with an acoustic reworking called "On the Floor 2.0".

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.