Why Music Critics Hate Imagine Dragons

First of all, I am not a music critic. I do, however, keep a pretty close eye on the music scene, and have enough of a background in music (play a couple of instruments, have decent enough understanding of theory, know a decent amount of the history of modern music) to try and explain why there seems to be such a disconnect — where almost anyone you talk to likes Imagine Dragons, yet music critics seem to hate them.

Let’s first note and refute one very simple thing that people say/are going to say. “Critics don’t like it because it’s not artsy enough”/ “Critics don’t like it because its too mainstream” etc. While lots of critics out there are searching for cutting-edge records they also understand that the average listener isn’t looking for that, and so while they may not always be impressed by solid pop music they certainly aren’t going to be heavily against it because its not ‘artsy’ or ‘complex’ or ‘ground-breaking’ enough. This is especially true of pop-music critics, who are usually people that don’t just love music, but love pop music. Hopefully that shuts down the idea that critics don’t like them because they are popular.

Alright… this is going to be a long one, so let’s get into this.

The Beginning: It Was Nuclear And Everyone Loved It

When Imagine Dragons dropped radioactive and it went nuclear, it went everywhere, everyone loved it. And I mean everyone. Critics did as well. Imagine Dragons were making music which was reminiscent of hard rock, which took the thumping, loud, visceral sound of rock and seamlessly molded it with new technology and made a 2013 pop hit. Impressive pop-rock had been done before, don’t get me wrong, for the majority of rock’s history there has been pop-rock which was good, but this was 2013. The soundscape of pop-music was not rock — the songs we remember from that time are Avici’s wake me up, Zed’s Clarity, anything Macklemore did. While, granted, the Lumineers and Awolnation (and probably a couple other rockish bands) managed to chart they were far from being the dominating sounds of pop or what people thought of when they thought pop music in the same way that Avici, Katy Perry, Justin Timberlake or (one of these things is not like the other) Imagine Dragons. They weren’t cutting-edge but they were accomplishing something significant, and contrary to what fedora wearing, death metal listening friend will tell you, writing a pop song (while it uses basic techniques) is extremely difficult to do. Knowing how to make something simple, marketable, loveable by the masses is hard, and getting critics to also like it on top of that, that’s an accomplishment.

Promising. We Think.

Imagine Dragons releases their album. And it was mostly good. Kinda. Look, if radioactive weren’t on their it probably would have been a meh album, but you have to understand that I am saying that with hindsight, at the time the album was considered great. And in all fairness it was pretty good. Songs like tip-toe, amsterdam, on top of the world, it’s time — these were ear worm songs that were entertaining.

On top of that, there wasn’t much reason to be negative because while not all the songs were amazing they were mostly all decent and showed a lot of promise. Amsterdam and Tip-Toe showed the ability to write ear worms, On Top Of The World showed they could write anthem type songs and then Radioactive… Radioactive showed a couple of things 1) it showed they could write songs with more than the usual amount of substance in a pop song, there wasn’t a lot of substance in radioactive but it definitely painted a vivid image and was pretty immersive 2) it showed they could show their passion, a lot of artists are passionate about music and making and performing it, but to be able to convey that through the music is a skill 3) they showed they could meld rock with the sounds and timbres of pop music to make good pop-rock. That last one was kinda a constant through most of the album. So with a great first couple of singles, a pretty good debut album what happenned?

The Omen: Demons

Demons was one of the few songs on the album that was just not good at all, and while in hindsight we can go back and see the band’s flaws we are currently aware of in a lot of their songs, Demons was the first place where these were clear as day light, and the fact that they put this on their album, that should have been a sign that something wasn’t right.

So, what’s wrong with Demons? Well I know a lot of people like it, and again here we start to see a disconnect between audience consensus and critic consensus. Demons had a few fundamental problems, but the one that most frustrates me is this: It sounds like a boring, dry, drained of life version of what an indie-rock ballad should be. Listen to Dan Reynolds singing on radioactive, and how you can almost feel the vibrations from his vocal chords, how clear it is that he is putting everything into it, then listen to him on Demons. Yes, he is trying to sound somber, but it just sounds dry, it sounds like he was told “write a ballad or two for the album” and he wrote a bunch of cliches, then because all the writing was just cliches he had no idea how to properly deliver it so its just vaguely somber.

That’s another issue which would later become very apparent but someone should have seen on Demons — the lyrics. There is a vague idea but it doesn’t really say anything. Its just a bunch of cliches.

“When the days are cold

“And the cards all fold”

Yeah, okay, I’ve never heard that before. And let’s be clear, its okay to be cliche or corny every now and then, but this was one line after the other as the intro to the song. That’s not a promising start. He then goes on to talk about his eyes are where his demons hide. Right. I’m not going through a word by word analysis of how the lyrics do not stand up on their own legs, and how they are just horribly bland and boring (the exact opposite of what Radioactive had us believe they were going to be).

Next problem with the song: Look lyrics aren’t everything, it’s music. Well we already talked about how boring Dan Reynolds voice is in it, and the instrumentation is no different. There are ways, by the way, to make airy, vibey, somber and toned down instrumentation interesting. Listen to anything of Lorde’s Pure Heroine (a pop album from the same time), listen to any of the big pop songs in the past year, a good amount of them have been pretty toned down. Listen to the entirety of the bedroom/indie pop scene. Its all airy,vibey, somber music — but it’s still interesting, or groovy, or something, anything more than just bland and forgettable.

While we are talking about early Omen’s we should also mention Night Vision’s (their debut album’s) tendancy to have lots of songs sound similar. The whole album (which I have listened to extensively) could easily have been 4 or 5 songs and contained the same amount of diversity in timbres, sounds, lyrics and ideas but been much much tighter because there wouldn’t be all this extra fluff. But it was their debut album, and again it had promise so people kind of let it slide.

Smoke and Mirrors: Have I Heard This Before?

There second album was pretty ironically named. I also listened to this album a decent amount, but I got sick of it a lot quicker than I got sick of Night Vision, and they must have been using some quality smoke and mirrors because it took me a while to figure out why.

Imagine Dragons has 3 songs up their sleeve: the epic stadium jam, the bouncy ear worm, the vague drawn out ballad. Those three descriptions could word for word fit any of their songs. Their range is not: stadium rock, catchy song, ballad. It is a very specific style of stadium jam, a very specific style of bounce-in-the-step ear worms, and a very specific style of boring, lulling, drawn out ballads. They slightly re-skinned some of their sounds so it would seem like they’ve gained some range (those were the smoke and mirrors) but the reality is that they didn’t change at all. When their latest album Evolution came out things were no different. The skin was more electronic, but Believer is eerily similar to Warriors and Radioactive (although Radioactive is far superior in my opinion, but they are all pretty much the same). Thunder is eerily similar to Tip-Toe and so on so forth.

So What? A Lot of Pop Artists are Repetitive

Well, yeah, but the part about Imagine Dragons which frustrates a lot of critics (and definitely frustrates me) is what they are the face of. Imagine Dragons burst onto the scene as an ‘indie rock’ band. When people think modern rock, and specifically indie rock Imagine Dragons is often what they go to.

Now indie-rock has already been horribly bastardized into a commercial show piece to appeal to the people who think listening to the Beatles or Pink Floyd makes you quirky and hipster, or think that calling 2-Pac the GOAT is a controversial statement — what I’m saying is they bastardized and commercialized indie-rock to prey on people who don’t really know what indie means, and their only exposure to it is as this quirky version of pop music. But with all that said, you still do get good indie-music coming from the people who are being used as the faces of this. Well it’s not really indie anymore, indie is really more of a genre than a descriptive term now, but still you do get good music from them, and there are still good indie-bands who are actually independent.

But Imagine Dragons became the face of indie and alt rock, which is just a horrific thought, the indie rock and alt rock scenes may not be at a creative peak at the moment or anything, but if you know where to look you can still find really good creative stuff. Imagine Dragons don’t even sound remotely rock anymore, at first they sounded like pop-rock, they sounded like rock using pop sounds, now they are full on pop music, but using the quirky indie image to try and flourish. Every time I say I listen to indie or alt rock and someone says “like Imagine Dragons” I cringe. Very visually and very audibly. But it’s not their fault, if they aren’t into indie-rock why would they know about it, but the industry and Imagine Dragons themselves have allowed that to be the case. Have allowed this very pop band (and let me just clarify that there is nothing wrong with being pop, I love some pop artists) be the face of music which is meant to be everything not pop, and everything not industrial. Look at that Imagine Dragons are a featured ‘Indie’ artist on Spotify. A lot of their ‘Indie’ artists are kind of insulting to see there, but this one stings more than most.

There were a lot of critics who thought Imagine Dragons had something to offer, had potential and showed promise. But by their second album they felt dried of creative ideas and by their third album they just sounded like sell outs. That’s why critics hate them, not because they are popular, but because they were meant to be the new voice of rock but ended up sounding like sell outs.

The most compelling argument I can make for that is listen to Radioactive and then right after it listen to Believer. Listen to Dan Reynolds voice in both and pay attention to it. Maybe its just me but it sounds like he’s just not giving it his all anymore. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m sure Dan Reynolds would say that I’m wrong, but to me it sounds like somethings changed.