While vocalist Dan Reynolds is still bellowing for dear life on initial singles “Natural” and “Machine,” the songs are less grating than their predecessors, especially the latter track’s Foo Fighters-soundalike elements. Maybe it’s because nothing on the album is as tedious as “Believer,” a song so painful that I banished the phrase “first things first” from my personal vocabulary on principle. More: How Imagine Dragons' faceless rock music became the genre's futureĪnd while this millennial fought against them for so long, considering Imagine Dragons the embodiment of everything boring about pop music right now, something changed over the past few years, culminating in the band’s new release “Origins,” its most listenable album yet. It’s a Frankensteinian formula that, with its boot-stomping folk melodies and synth bloops over heavy beats and crashing choruses, sounds like an artificial-intelligence-generated representation of the music millennials are supposed to like. Instead, their music takes the most emotive songwriting trends of 2010s music, all those moments in popular folk and pop and EDM songs designed to make the listener feel something, and packages them together. Their numerous Grammy nominations may fall in the rock category, but Imagine Dragons are even less a rock band than their Coldplay and Maroon 5 Top 40-radio brethren. One day they were nobodies the next, their 2013 breakthrough single “Radioactive” was everywhere, a process that repeated with “Believer,” their 2017 single that seemingly appeared in every other blockbuster movie trailer that year.
The band’s journey to becoming one of the biggest rock bands of the decade, though, seemed to happen all at once. It happened slowly, Imagine Dragons’ transition from “the annoying band in all the movie trailers” to “the slightly-less-annoying band whose song I won’t change on the radio” to “the band whose album I may listen to, voluntarily.”
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