IMAGINE DRAGONS EVOLVE THEIR SOUND WITH THE LATEST RELEASE
Stadium rockers to play at Rogers Place on Oct. 10
The Imagine Dragons were on stage at the Hollywood Bowl performing uplifting tracks from their third record, Evolve, when the unthinkable happened in their hometown.
When the four-piece band exited the stage on Oct. 1, they heard news about a gunman massacring concertgoers at a music festival on the Las Vegas Strip. Eventually, it was confirmed that 58 people were killed.
But on that night in Los Angeles, as in the rest of the world, there was just a lot of confusion.
“It was shocking,” says drummer Daniel Platzman, in a phone interview later that week with Postmedia. “We came offstage basically to everybody around TVs, trying to figure out what was going on. I’m very proud of Vegas: the first responders, all the respect to them. It’s very heartbreaking. I’m still processing it, to be honest with you. Hopefully, we can come together and create some change.”
Alongside The Killers and Panic! at the Disco, the Imagine Dragons are likely the most high-profile rock band associated with Sin City these days. Developing their sound and act in front of Vegas audiences in the early days played a huge role in turning Imagine Dragons into the stadium crowd-pleasers they are today.
Platzman believes art, in general, can play a part in healing his country. “It’s more important than ever to continue gathering and continue creating art,” he says. “I’m going to bungle it, but there’s a great Leonard Bernstein quote about how when something horrible happens, it’s more important to create beautiful things than ever.”
So there will still be plenty of joy emanating from the stage when the Imagine Dragons cross into Canada, which includes an Oct. 10 show at Rogers Place.
While the band has always been known for its bombastic anthems, many of the tunes on the new album Evolve have more of a celebratory feel than those on the mopier two that preceded it.
That includes first single Believer, with its power-through-pain type lyrics such as “I’m the one at the sail, I’m the master of my sea” and its soaring, singalong chorus.
“We have so much fun up there and this tour has been no exception to that,” Platzman says. “There’s brand new spots to interact with each other on the stage.”
In a relatively short period of time — Night Visions, the band’s debut, came out in 2012 — Imagine Dragons have ascended to the top of the mainstream rock world. Which also meant the band’s move to stadiums happened fairly quickly in the grand scheme of things. But Platzman says the Dragons have also been able to maintain a certain intimacy with its audience, even as the crowds grew exponentially larger. He credits the charisma and energy of frontman Dan Reynolds for this, but also the band’s salad days earning their stripes on the strip.
“It goes back to the band’s Vegas roots, playing the casino floors (and) playing for audiences that in
no way came to see the band perform,” Platzman says. “But it was our job to perform in such a way that they stayed and bought a second drink and turned their heads and stayed for an extra 15 minutes. You’d get hired back by the casino because that’s your job, to keep the people in the room. That kind of a culture definitely helps with establishing a connection.”
Still, given the band’s relatively rapid rise, it’s no surprise that they decided to take a bit of a breather a few years back after touring behind their 2015 sophomore disc, Smoke + Mirrors. The band, which also includes guitarist Wayne Sermon and bassist Ben McKee, entered the studio well-rested and determined to shake up their sound when it came to the followup.
That involved bringing in some outside influences. The first two albums were produced by the band and Alexander (Alexa da Kid) Grant, who heads the Dragons’ record label Kidinakorner. Grant worked on Evolve as well, but the band also enlisted Swedish production team Mattman & Robin, who have helped shape hits for Taylor Swift, Carly Rae Jepson and Britney Spears, and Joel Little, best known for producing Lorde’s blockbuster Pure Heroine.
“It was so refreshing to just be wearing the musician hat and to know that somebody else would say ‘You got the take. Let’s move on,’ ” Platzman says. “We are all perfectionists, between the four of us. It’s really hard for us to come up where all four of us agree. If there’s something all four of us agree on, we know we have something special but it takes a really long time to get there.”
While the band was happy with Smoke + Mirrors, it was an exhausting affair to self-produce, with Grant and the band poring over hundreds of tracks and limitless possibilities to shape the sound.
“It just got muddy,” Platzman. “With Evolve, I think we just hit this place of clarity. Working with all these different producers, we got a cleaner esthetic.”
While comparatively stripped down, Evolve still possesses a variety of sounds, adding dancerock, hip-hop, trip-hop and the odd metallic guitar crunch to their hallmark anthems. It’s the sort of approach that makes them stadium-ready and perfect for rock radio, even if it doesn’t exactly endear them to critics.
NME said Evolve represents “a small progression, but it’s far from an evolution,” while the Independent accused the Dragons of “devolving back to the hoariest of tired rock clichés.”
“I think it’s unhealthy to check it too much, or put too much value on somebody else’s negative words, if they are negative words,” says Platzman, when asked if he reads the Dragons’ press. “That’s a fearbased thing: ‘Oh, what are people thinking?’ I think that’s wrong.”
As for the fame that comes along with selling millions of records and winning a Grammy — for best rock performance in 2014 — Platzman says it hasn’t been too distracting.
“I feel like I still get to live a lowprofile, normal life in Vegas,” he says. “I can’t say that I feel fame is cramping my style.”
“I’m making quotation marks with my fingers,” he adds with a laugh. “I just realized you can’t see them.”