[4] The band began working on the album at their own Battle Born Studios and also rented houses in Joshua Tree National Park and San Diego.
They briefly recorded with Ryan Tedder and other producers in Los Angeles before beginning to work with Jacknife Lee, who had been recommended to them by U2 frontman Bono.
[5] Lee produced all tracks on the album alongside the Killers, with additional production by Erol Alkan on "The Man" and Stuart Price on "Out of My Mind".
[8][9] After celebrating the 10th anniversary of their second album Sam's Town by holding a few concerts, Flowers realized they wanted to make an actual record and not just "slap a bunch of songs together".
[10] According to him, the idea for the title of the album came when he was in the desert and saw a storm coming: "I thought 'wonderful, wonderful' and I was able to use it in a song that I wrote with Mark, our bass player, and it ended being an important part of the record.
"[11] The Killers enlisted Dire Straits vocalist and lead guitarist Mark Knopfler for a guitar part on "Have All the Songs Been Written?".
Australian musician Alex Cameron contributed lyrics to some tracks, including "Run for Cover", which was originally written for the band's third studio album, Day & Age (2008).
[10] Lyrically, the album is about what it means to be a man, as Flowers revealed on an interview with Entertainment Weekly: "In your head it's about being tough and bringing home the bacon, but what I've come to find is it's really more about empathy and compassion."
was originally the subject line of an email Flowers sent to Bono, in the midst of a bout of writer's block, before the latter suggested it would make an excellent song title.
[16] Among the tweets was a photograph of Brandon Flowers wearing a silver jacket with gold lettering spelling out "The Man", which turned out to be the title of the song.
"Some Kind of Love" was released on September 15 as the third promotional single from the album, which was influenced by English musician Brian Eno.
[29] On the short tour the band embarked on in September 2017, the songs "The Calling", "Tyson vs Douglas", and "Life to Come" were played during the encore.
Writing a four-star review for NME, Barry Nicolson said, "As a songwriter, Flowers has never been particularly guarded about himself – he's neurotic, driven, sentimental and sometimes corny – but he bares more on 'Wonderful Wonderful' than ever before, and the result is the band's best album since 2006's 'Sam's Town'.
[38] In a positive review, Niall Doherty of Q magazine described it as a "glossy indie-pop album with sonics as slick and glistening as a brand-new Vegas skyscraper".
[46] Selling 51,756 copies (including 2,711 from sales-equivalent streams) in the United Kingdom in its first week,[47] the Killers became the first international act to chart its first five studio albums at number one.