People often make fun of Imagine Dragons because “they’ve never experimented/made anything original/tried something that isn’t mall-safe generic pop music”. As someone who used to listen to a lot of Imagine Dragons, I think they’ve actually done some really original stuff in the past. But basically nobody knows about that.

The majority of people know ID through radio and streaming, but my main method of consuming ID music was through CDs. I first got the Evolve album simply because I thought the artist name sounded cool, and I ended up liking it enough that for the next few years I would just look for new ID albums in music stores. So unlike most people, I listened to a lot more than what just got popular. And there’s one album in particular that’s actually kinda good but nobody talks about it. Smoke + Mirrors. I mean there’s some generic ish stuff like It Comes Back To You but a lot of it is actually pretty original. Smoke and Mirrors is a unique kind of ambient pop I don’t see very often, Friction is strangely agressive and distorted compared to most ID songs, Dream is super huge, emotional and atmospheric, The Fall is SIX MINUTES, and the general style of the album is just really interesting to me.

However, they have fallen off hard. And now they are mid. And we can make fun of them.