Imagine Dragons - Origins

Pitchfork 53

The Las Vegas rock band’s fourth album is categorically soaring and sometimes pleasant, but it is so broad and hollow that it is difficult to feel anything these guys are feeling.

The Guardian 40

The most streamed rock band in the world may want us to believe they are angry philosophers, but the reality doesn’t change a gilt-edged mainstream formula

If you like mind-bending statistics, then Imagine Dragons are very much the band for you. Their EDM-infused 2012 saga of apocalyptic dread, Radioactive, is the longest-running single in the history of the Billboard charts: 87 weeks on the Top 100. They are the most-streamed rock band in the world, with 37.5m monthly listeners on Spotify: stitch that, Coldplay, with your paltry 27.5m. Their debut album, Night Visions, spent five years on the US charts, the kind of success that enabled people to call its follow-up, Smoke & Mirrors, “commercially underwhelming” because it only sold 1m copies in the US. Normal service was resumed with 2017’s Evolve, enticingly described by the band’s lead singer Dan Reynolds, in true caution-to-the-wind, motormouthed style, as “a more palatable album for this generation and this time period”. It spawned the singles Believer and Thunder, collectively streamed 1.6bn times.