Imagine That: On The Profound Potential of Albums
Elephants, nostalgia, and how Imagine Dragons went from "Radioactive" to radioactive
July 2013
It’s early, which for me means around 9am.
The windows are open in the house, and the smell of warm dew wafts into the kitchen.
I shuffle downstairs, hair messy and eyes blurry from a night well slept. With a yawn, I open my mom’s laptop.
I double-click on my ongoing Word document and wait for it to open.
Hold on, I think. I should put on some music.
September 2024
It’s late, which for me means around 9am.
The windows are open in my apartment, and the morning air smells like changing leaves.
I shuffle over to my computer, hair shorter but still messy, eyes older but still blurry. I open my laptop.
It’s only fitting, I think, and pull up Spotify. I navigate to the same band that soundtracked my writing over a decade ago.
I push play.
I really like Imagine Dragons.
It’s important that you know that.
It’s important that you know that Night Visions fills me with nostalgia. My first writing album. Twelve years old, typing out my little novels, blasting “Hear Me” and “Round and Round” for hours on end.
It’s important that you know how much I love Smoke + Mirrors. How surprised I was when I first heard the riff of “I’m So Sorry” or the solo in “Hopeless Opus.” How I rushed upstairs to learn the intro to “Shots” on the guitar.
It’s important that you know that my first ever concert was Imagine Dragons. I was with my family in the literal back row of a giant arena and had the time of my life.
It’s important you know these things, because then you’ll know that I’m coming at the band’s last few albums from a place of love, respect, and profound disappointment.
Let me explain.
Part 1. Ignition
I love albums.
In fact, a well-composed album might be my favorite medium of art.
More than any painting, film, or novel, the album is able to present a single overarching theme viewed through many fractured lenses. Composers poke and prod the same idea from different angles in order to produce a nuanced final product that asserts some central thesis and, more often than not, elicits a strong emotional response in the listener.
Consider the parable in which several blind men encounter an elephant for the first time. Each touches a different part of the animal, whether the side, the trunk, the tail, or the tusk. Then they all share their findings and are baffled when they can’t agree on any of the elephant’s characteristics.
I bring this up because every song on an album offers a similarly isolated view of a larger idea. It’s only when we listen to them all together in the context of the complete album that we gain a deeper understanding of what the artist is hoping to convey.
Part II. Reaction
To demonstrate this phenomenon, I want to step through every song of Imagine Dragons’ second album, Smoke + Mirrors.
But before we do that, here’s a quick refresher on the early days of Imagine Dragons.
Night Visions, their debut album, released in September 2012.
“Radioactive” broke the record for most weeks charted on Billboard’s Hot 1001.
Billboard awarded them “Breakout Band of 2013”2.
You couldn’t walk through a Target without hearing “Demons” or “It’s Time” blaring from the speakers3.
By all accounts, Night Visions was a tremendous success. Any band would dream of reaching the heights to which Imagine Dragons rocketed in only a few months.
With this in mind, let’s check out what happened next.
“I’m sorry for everything, oh everything I’ve done.”
Out of the reverb-soaked lead guitar emerges this thematic apology. It’s the first line of the first song (“Shots”) and we’re already asking the central question of the album:
Why is the speaker apologizing?
We get the answer, at least in part, on “Gold,” a thinly veiled metaphor for the meteoric rise of the band following Night Visions.
“Only at first did it have its appeal /
But now you can't tell the false from the real.”
Here the speaker rues the false friends, false promises, and perhaps even a false sense of self-worth that stemmed from their sudden success.
This theme continues in the eponymous “Smoke And Mirrors,” a track which grapples with the hollowness of fame and fortune.
“All I believe, is it a dream /
That comes crashing down on me?”
An ethereal, soaring guitar solo concludes “Smoke and Mirrors” and eases us into a moment of silence.
Then we hear an electric guitar riff. Quiet at first, and then—
BOOOM.
“I’m So Sorry” recontextualizes the apologetic conceit that drives the album by turning the whole sentiment on its head.
“I get mine and make no excuses /
Waste of precious breath.”
With this understanding, the loud repetition of “I’M SO SORRY” in the chorus becomes sarcastic, deriding the idea that the speaker has anything to apologize for. It’s a tough world, and they did what they had to do to get by.
In the context of the success attained by Night Visions, we can interpret this song as loudly rejecting any accusations of selling out.
This harsh perspective is softened in the bridge:
“And I know, I know that I did you wrong /
But will you trust me when I say that I'll /
Make it up to you somehow, somehow…”
Perhaps the speaker does feel a little guilty after all. A new question emerges, then: who is this “you” who requires making up?
Enter “I Bet My Life,” a track which returns to our motif of apologies and offers an clue as to their recipient.
“I know I took the path that you would never want for me /
I know I let you down, didn't I?”
Sounds parental to me!
If “I’m So Sorry” saw the speaker lashing out in anger from their internal guilt, “I Bet My Life” signals a sort of resigned acceptance.
What’s more, directing the apology towards the speaker’s own parents suggests that they have not become the person that they wanted to be as a child.
This acceptance is further realized on “Polaroid,” a bouncy campfire-sing-along that expands on the speaker’s guilt.
“I'm a reckless mistake.”
There’s a crucial turn here in the bridge:
“I'm gonna get ready /
For the rain to pour heavy /
Oh, let it fall, fall /
Let it fall upon my head.”
How baptismal! Here, at the midpoint of the album, the speaker acknowledges that they’ve messed up and begins to try to turn things around.
Only, it’s not as easy as they hoped.
In addition to soundtracking one of the greatest trailers ever cut, “Friction” finds the speaker once again lashing out in anger against internal strife. Before, it was guilt; now, it’s the difficulty of accomplishing meaningful change.
“Don't tell me to be strong /
You can't fight the friction”
This struggle between what is right and what is easy continues in “It Comes Back To You,” a song which features pessimistic verses followed by optimistic choruses. Whenever the speaker considers giving up, they are reminded of their motivations:
“It comes back to you, it comes back to you /
Looking back into the past and I can see it through.”
Next up is “Dream.” Contemplative and slow, the speaker reflects on where they came from and where they’re going.
“And I'm short of the others’ dreams /
Of being golden and on top.”
The use of “golden” here reminds us of where the speaker began their journey, when everything they touched turned to gold (…gold…gold…).
Additionally, this song provides meaningful context for the start of the album. We understand that the fame and fortune were never the speaker’s goals; they were “the others’ dreams.” This, in turn, reminds us of “I Bet My Life,” when we first suspected that the speaker’s life has not gone the way they had hoped.
And now, “Trouble” walks in.
“So pray for me, brother, I need redemption /
I'm just a man, a man on a mission.”
“Trouble” marks the beginning of Act III of the album’s overarching narrative. After selling out for the finer things in life, our speaker has acknowledged their faults, struggled to remedy them, and now endeavors to complete their redemptive mission.
“Summer” shines more light on the speaker’s journey, calling back to the themes of “Gold” and “Smoke And Mirrors” while reiterating that fame was never something the speaker desired.
“And what I saw was opulence and… /
And that's not for me.”
And now, we arrive at my favorite song of the album. “Hopeless Opus” sees the speaker face their last temptation.
“I'm in this race, and I'm hoping just to place /
Oh, I'm trying not to face what's become of me /
My hopeless opus.”
The whole track screams a fearful reluctance to conversion and redemption. Even if the speaker is willing to do the work to redeem themselves…do they deserve it4? Is it too late?
“The Fall” provides the climactic answer to all of the questions we’ve posed. I almost want to copy/paste the entire song here. Instead, I’ll just include the chorus.
“I'm ready for the fall /
I'm ready for everything that I believed in to drift away.
Ready for the leaves /
Ready for the colors to burn to gold /
And crumble away.
This is why I love albums so much.
Look at all of the callbacks, from “gold” (“Gold”) to “everything that I believed” (“Smoke And Mirrors”) to the very idea of falling (“Polaroid”).
Look at how after the reflections of “Summer,” the speaker is ready to enter the “Fall.”
Look at how the speaker’s journey culminates in a triumphant moment of change and rebirth.
Smoke + Mirrors offers a thorough meditation on guilt, forgiveness, and redemption.
Every song stands on its own, but when we take them together they fit together like pieces of puzzle, asking and answering questions posed throughout the overarching narrative.
This album is Imagine Dragons at their most lyrically and musically interesting. They’re trying new things. They’re testing out new sonic landscapes. They’re experimenting with large-scale, thematic storytelling.
And it works. In contemplating how to reconcile their own stardom with their artistic integrity, Imagine Dragons elevated both.
Part III. Fallout
I want to tread carefully now as I march to my conclusion.
I know that, to many, Imagine Dragons have become a somewhat cringe vestige of a bygone era. But I also know that if you scroll through the comments of their latest music videos, you’ll find a lot of people sharing how meaningful the band still is to them.
Because of this, I don’t want to write off everything the band has done since Smoke + Mirrors as unoriginal drivel. Because it’s not. It’s art, and it speaks to some people more than others.
Instead, I’ll argue that they have put less care into developing albums and more care into making songs.
In their recent discography, it seems that large, sweeping narratives have been replaced with small-scale, attention-grabbing singles. And this will always be less effective at delivering complex messages.
Take “Thunder,” for example, a song off of Evolve that took something relatable (bullying) and made it unrelatable via a strangely shallow outlook:
They say you're basic, they say you're easy /
You're always riding in the back seat.
Now I'm smiling from the stage while /
You were clapping in the nosebleeds.
While the “nosebleeds” wordplay is fun, the idea that the speaker was bullied in school but is fine now because he’s a world famous musician is a wild moral to the story.
This song is meant to a life-affirming anthem against hatred and bigotry. But simply chanting “Never give up” in between repetitions of “Feel the thunder!” doesn’t strike me as particularly impactful.
To contrast, consider Gang of Youth’s masterpiece album Go Farther in Lightness5. By the time you reach the climax of the album, the speaker has more than earned the right to proclaim, in a raw, unbridled scream, “SAY YES TO LIFE!”
Needless to say, it’s not fair to compare the nuance and emotional weight of one song against that of an entire album. But that’s exactly the point I’m trying to make. Songs like “Nice To Meet You” and “Eyes Closed” (off their latest album LOOM) sound like they were made exclusively to become TikTok sounds. What’s worse, they’re back to back on the album yet have absolutely nothing to do with one another.
Rather than thoroughly examine a complicated theme through a kaleidoscope of related songs, the band has pivoted to albums that sound and feel more like playlists: collections of hits with little connection to each other.
I haven’t lost faith in Imagine Dragons.
I’ll continue to side-eye their new releases with a cautious sense of curiosity. I'll hold on to the hope that they might someday return to the long-form storytelling that made Smoke + Mirrors so great. I’ll wait patiently for their next great album.
And in the meantime, I’ll keep shuffling over to my laptop on quiet mornings to hit play on Night Visions and type along to the soundtrack of my childhood.
Because despite everything we’ve learned today, some things will never change.
Now imagine draggin’ deez—
Personal experience
That guitar solo deserves it, I’ll tell you that much.
A full deep dive of Go Farther in Lightness is beyond the scope of this newsletter and will be left as an exercise to the reader.